Quality Through Innovation
Waaaay back during Hurricane Katrina I took a Rapid Software Testing course and they (Jame) could articulate an argument for anything. I started to blog because I wanted to think through opinions before challenged on them. I'm not in the Quality / Testing world really anymore (...haven't for over a decade if we're honest) so this blog has ran its course. Now it's officially archived.
The formatting is a bit wonky, but It'll get fixed it later. (Narrator: No, it won't.)
Open Tabs – 11/27/21
Keynote vs Track (Revisited)
What I Learned Yesterday – 1/6/2018
What I Learned Yesterday – 1/4/2018
What I Learned Yesterday – 1/3/2018
What I Learned Yesterday – 1/2/2018
What I Learned Yesterday – 1/1/2018
What I Learned Yesterday – 12/31/2017
What I Learned Yesterday – 12/30/2017
What I Learned Yesterday – 12/29/2017
Continuous Delivery in a .NET World
Lessons learned from 19 months of a delivery manager
SaaS vs Hosted
Geography and Platform
Do you really know the business your startup is in?
So you need to start caring about Security and Privacy
Am I Coming To Your Conference (or ‘Consultant Math’)
My notes from TorontoGROWtalks 2013
My hair-brained scheme to kicking testing conferences out of a rut
Be Yourself!
COP FLUNG A GUN
The Dark Tower
Continuity
Detail is Dead Wood
Notes from Blue Jays Winter Tour (Toronto) 2012
Logic Problems & Programming in Interviews
Two of the most dangerous terms in Agile; Done and Whole Team
More adventures in magic automation numbers
A Cool Graph, but…
The ‘Un-Testing Conf’
Because that is how they got that way
Set Course For Awesome (as a ‘Career Tester’)
The impact having an online presence makes to an author
Its all about the Bordens
How to ‘properly’ build multiple Facebook games
Really step up to the plate for the Open Web
Badges; carrot, not stick!
Badges as the centre of the Web Maker solar system
Interesting things happen when you visualize stuff
Scouts, Badges and Mozilla
Tags and Badges
Web Makers and the Open Web
Continuous Delivery is landing at CodeMash
The Business Model
Two more podcasts on Page Speed
Three Podcasts on Page Speed
Fixing the Android Application Development Culture
The TDD loop for Android Content Providers
How Not To Present At A Meetup
A Facebook application checklist
Jedis and Testing
Choke
Startup Pricing
Using skill in Bridge to guide tests
Talent Is Overrated
Software G Forces
Star West 2010 – Summary
The HP Booth Staff (Goons) Owe Me an Apology
Handling Failures in Automated Acceptance Tests
Futility-based Test Automation
Testing Dialogues: Automation Issues
State-driven Testing: An Innovation in UI Test Automation
Automating Test Design in Agile Development Environments
Building a Successful Test Automation Strategy
Where I start to experiment with Cucumber
Keynote vs. Track
Commitment
New things to steal from the Japanese
Coaching with Questions
‘Beecause’ is a heuristic
Introverts
Amber Mac on using a consultant well
Chain Gang
Agile Test Case Management – Summary
Kathy Sierra at Business of Software 2009
TWST6 – Mitigated Speech
Seth Godin since my birthday
The Essential Engineer
Motivated Magazine – Summer 2010
Investment Modeling a Software Tester’s Perspective
Creating a Nolan Ryan Culture
Going narrower to get wider
SeConf2010 – The Survey Results
Shop Class as Testcraft
Discovery Testing
Why Do You Test?
I blame James
Insights, not just information
The Selenium-IDE 1.x plugin API (Part 11) – Exporting New Commands
All Solutions Have a Problem
Desire Paths
The next wave of learning
The Many Hats of a Tester
Testing Inspiration When You Least Expect It
The Buccaneer Tester: Winning Your Reputation
A Smattering of Selenium #15
An Update
A Smattering of Selenium #14
Five Months of ‘The Startup Success Podcast’
A Smattering of Selenium #13
A Smattering of Selenium #12
SEO is a scam. ‘The Art of SEO’ isn’t.
Elevator Pitches
The Selenium-IDE 1.x plugin API (Part 10) – Registering your plugin
A Smattering of Selenium #11
Understanding Privacy
Patterns from the ‘100 Best Companies To Work For’
Apprenticeship Patterns
The Selenium-IDE 1.x plugin API (Part 9) – Secure Password Storage
The Selenium-IDE 1.x plugin API (Part 8) – Localization
From the belly of the factory beast
Jeff Atwood at SF DevDay
Sikuli – Just because it is New, doesn’t mean it is Hot.
The Selenium-IDE 1.x plugin API (Part 7) – Packaging Nuances
The Great Trust Offensive
Leadership ‘profiles’
Presenting to the board: how to handle the heat
The Selenium-IDE 1.x plugin API (Part 6) – Formatters
The Selenium-IDE 1.x plugin API (Part 5) – Publishing Updates
The Selenium-IDE 1.x plugin API (Part 4) – Extending the Selenium API
Stretching
The Selenium-IDE 1.x plugin API (Part 3) – The Sidebar
The Selenium-IDE 1.x plugin API (Part 2) – The Toolbar
The Selenium-IDE 1.x plugin API (Part 1) – Build and Preferences
Becoming an Evangelist (part 3)
Becoming an Evangelist (part 2)
Becoming an Evangelist (part 1)
A Smattering of Selenium #11
Selenium-IDE 2.0 – The Great Pluginification
How to Be a Professional
Most Important Book of 2009?
The Problem with Major Revisions
A Smattering of Selenium #10
A Smattering of Selenium #9
Getting the most out of your Selenium scripts
Conspiring out loud about Selenium-IDE 2.0
A Smattering of Selenium #8
Great Public Speaking Skills
Writing Maintainable Automated Acceptance Tests
Agile Tour Toronto 2009 – Wrapup
Implicit vs. Explicit Requirements (and look-and-feel)
A Smattering of Selenium #7
Dear Santa, this year for Selenium I would like…
Two items from this week’s Writing Excuses
A Smattering of Selenium #6
Joy (and some Awesome)
Vehement disagreement is desirable
Devil’s Advocate
Adoption Velocity
Creating a Successful Firm
Shortcuts
ATT2009 – Declan Whelan – Building a Learning Culture on Your Agile Team
A Smattering of Selenium #5
Redistributing Microsoft Libraries
ATT2009 – Stelios Pantazopoulos – Project Vital Signs
ATT2009 – Thanou Thirakul – Large Scale Testing in Agile Time
ATT2009 – Scott Ambler – Agile at Scale
A Smattering of Selenium #4
Everyday Heuristics
Discover, Decision, Action
A Smattering of Selenium #3
The Most Important Stakeholder is You
Seth Godin since July
The Goalpost problem
Depends on your definition of expert
Slide:ology Webinar
A Smattering of Selenium #2
Hudson, Capistrano and SSH
Rhythm
Losing the room
TWST5 – Day One
A Quality Experience during deployments
A Smattering of Selenium #1
Noticing
Tree or Tags. Or both?
The Captain is the Captain of their ship. And only their ship. Sometimes.
The tester paradigm sweet spot
Sure, Quality is nice, but Support and Ecosystem wins the game
The most important role for quality is the Product Owner (?!)
I’m not the Gatekeeper! (except when I am)
The red flag that is ‘And’
How does the market view your employer?
Why Diversity in Background Matters
‘Exploratory Software Testing’ – a cheat of a book
Be prepared, but don’t carry knives
Bits and Pieces from the 8/31 Fortune
Selenium Open Jam at Agile2009
Remembering without knowing it
ROI of a Test
The Agile Hats Art Show (Part Two)
How They Test Software At Microsoft
My Agile 2009 Summary
The Agile Hats Art Show (Part One)
Principles of Puppetry
Testing Rails
Joe Maddon on team building
Attributes of an Automated Test
Esther and Diana’s Excellent Retrospective Adventures
Facilitator of Work
How to sell a traditional client on an Agile project plan
Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) in Practice
When Team Culture and Company Culture Does Not Mix: Social Deviance
The Best Leadership Is Good Management
10 Temptations of an Agile Coach (new or experienced)
Giving and Receiving Effective Feedback
A conversation with Neal Ford
3 baseball quotes for today
Learning the Importance of Knowledge Sharing
Morale
Agile methodology – ‘defined’
Baseball and bugs making it to production
Agile 2009 is next week
The other first impressions
Creating Passionate Users
The Future of Agile Software Testing with xUnit And Beyond
In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable
The Best Advice I Ever Got
The Scrum Methodology
Remember, metrics don’t always tell the whole story
Utility Players
The Tester’s Bookshelf
Google Web Optimizer Case Study
Relax, Attack and Control the Throttle
All About Artifacts (Part Three) – Test Cases: Styles, Authors and Inspiration
All About Artifacts (Part Two) – Test Cases: Why, Rules and Spectrum
That’s not the version of the jar I configured!
We did all this research … now what?
Great teams are made with ‘character’
Good Advertising
All About Artifacts (Part One) – Test Strategy and Plans
Closing the Innovation Gap
Better Internet Performance
Entity Analytics
So how are we doing?
Waaay too many episodes of the Startup Success Podcast
Interval of Interest and the Mobile Experience
Every automated test should do ONE thing really well
Stackoverflow Podcast – Testing Edition
Look for passion in inherited teams
4 issues of ST&P I had laying around
Notes from my Cast Iron training
Lessons on being a better trainer
Why iterations work – decision points
An agile-testing mailing list wrap-up
The MDN Show
I declare the inaugural Atlanta Tester Dinner a success
Beautiful Testing – What’s Inside
Killing the Buddha
Lessons from the bullpen
Culture change catalyst
Your team is about to shrink
Walking the walk
Pitchers and Roughnecks
How to be a Community Superhero
A Conversation with Stuart Halloway
Agents of Change / When you’ve lost the room
The problem with Titles
Caveman’s Logic
Death Marches and Zombies
Quality lives and dies by the Culture
Feedback
Best coach? Ever?
ScrumMasters
Actions of True Leadership
Another from the ‘Humans are complicated’ file
Controlling the Selenium server from in Rails
RDoc and Hudson
A bit of an update
YSlow and Continuous Integration
Economics and Testing
Scaling Rails
Three months of armed donkeys
Testing Task Archetypes
The Legend of Zealot Anarchist Robot – Ignite
Considerations for an Enterprise Test Automation Implementation
Alan Mulally: The Outsider at Ford
The problem with heroes
Continuous Checking E-book?
Lessons from ‘Doc’ Halladay
Ready, Aim … Fail
Blog Blazers
Measure Twice, Cut Once
SOA Testing
The minefield problem – as illustrated by the Roomba
Broken Windows
Attributes of Future Leaders
Running a Community is like, hard
The Value of Analysis and Plateaus
Leadership Machine
Performance Tricks, Tweaks and Lessons
Anchors
Twitter and Quality
Scripting Recipes at KWSQA2009
Philosophy beats Method. In golf and testing.
Somethings things are prettier from a far
The Legend of Zealot Anarchist Robot
Necessity of Belief
The problem with Smells
Illusions, Sheriffs and Grassroots
Quality Leadership Strategy: Rotation
How to Become a Great Leader
Hiding your general inquiry email address
Igniting the Third Factor
Flaw Injection (on a team level)
JSONP server-side shenanigans
Reward Systems
How Great Companies Turn Crisis Into Opportunity
The Spotlight Effect
The World’s Most Admired Companies
STP February, 2009
Agile Testing
The ‘Code’
Finding Your Inner Courage
Flickr of the wrist
Games Testers Play
Online Community Management 101
Uncle Bob on StackOverflow
Was Buddha a Contextualist
Why Whinging Doesn’t Work
Just because there is ice, doesn’t mean you will slip
Empathy
Marketing During an Economic Meltdown
Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes
Can Anyone be a Tester?
The Economics of Small Decisions
The Mind of the Inventor
adam’s fundamental rule for successful bughunting (or, how not to go crazy in a crazy business)
Bridging the Communications Gap
Sometimes results are just silly — but correct
CSS order and inheritence
Do you need…
Agile 2009 Proposals
Explicit vs. Implicit roles
Weaving
Be Professional. Always.
Yes We Can
How to Manage your Business in a Recession
Yet another reason usability matters
How to Become a More Effective Learner
Tours
Is television catching onto the idea of observation?
More Footsteps in the Snow
Attributes of Organizational Quality
The Larry Test
Tribes
Footsteps in the Snow
Oates on Aging
Scalability Design Patterns
Experiences Threat Modeling at Microsoft
But what if I don’t want <i>all</i> my mail relayed?
Signs of a GOOD Manager / Team Lead
How to Reinvent Yourself
How to Be a Leader in Your Field
The Brand You is Dead & Rails Activists
Elevator Pitches
a bunch of why’s, a who, a how and a what
Testing advice by Thelonious Monk
Human-centered Design
Video Game Design
Blog feedback survey
Recognition, Confidence and Credibility
How to Kick Ass
Searching for Evil
EPA Fuel Economy Guides – The data provisioning anti-pattern
Guidelines on Writing a Philosophy Paper
Agile-Testing roundup
Dell in Biotech
Real World Data is Dirty
Beautiful Testing is a Go!
Notes from building EC2 Images
STP – October through December
SD Times – October through December
BITW – SD Times’ erroneous select box
All Hat and No Cattle
More Perception Tests
High-End Boutique Software Testing
Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship
A new metric: WTFAIDH / x
Splitting Subversion repositories
How to choose a testing course
Dynamic javascript file inclusion with JQuery and AJAX
Role of Management
Ethics, Certificates and Teaching. Oh, and Money
Contract Testing Checklist
Selenium Infrastructure
Now with 50% more twitter
Test Case “Rules”
Guess what. Other people are not you.
The ‘Deep Bruise’ Heuristic
Firefox extensions for testing
How (or how not) to do a presentation
GLSEC2008 – Scripting Recipes for Testers
GLSEC2008 – “Watch The Fine Video” is the new “RTFM”
GLSEC2008 – Using Metrics to Take a Hard Look at Your Code
GLSEC2008 – Using Offshore Resources for Efficient Quality AssuranceGLSEC2008 – Using Offshore Resources for Efficient Quality Assurance
GLSEC2008 – Developing at the Pace of Business
Scripting Recipe – Tail’ing the Event Log
Scripting Recipe – Oracles & Test Generation
Scripting Tutorial – Which Language?
Scripting Recipe – Metaframeworks
Scripting Recipe – Log Parse / Test Selection
Scripting Recipe – Audible log monitoring
Scripting Recipe – i18n and l10n (LOUD)
Scripting Recipe – Developer Notes
Scripting Recipes Tutorial
My next business card?
Combatting Helplessness
What I think Greg’s students should know about Testing
Multiple Secure Virtual Hosts with Apache
Types of Exploratory Testing
5 more 5 questions with…
There is a lot to think about doing execution replays
Ideology vs. Facts
Stickiness
Controlling Apache nodes
Mirroring People
Non Obvious Relationship Analysis
Arming the Donkeys
Is Knowing Math Necessary?
Pessimism
Saying ‘No’ is okay
You now have my permission to be selfish
Ant In Action
Apparently I’ve been slacking on ST&P summaries
Addressing the Skills Gap
Kierkegaard on Best Practices
Assistants
Comets
The end of an era
Build Analysis: Questions Answered, Questions Raised
Today’s sports quotes
Theories about Persuasion
Overcoming Bias
Lessons learned from Agile2008
Lean Release Management Webinar
TWST4 – Deception and Self-Deception – Day Two
TWST4 – Deception and Self-deception – Day One
Testing is Overrated
But am I testing the RIGHT thing?
Automated Defect Prevention
Better Changers make Better Testers?
BITW – Accidental Breast Reduction
And we will beat you!
More on svn hooks
policy enforcement with svn hooks
Testing is never finished; it is ended
Archetypes of Testing
Predictably Irrational
A whole bunch of updates
The notion of ‘schools’
Exceptional Performance Worksheet
I Can Has Shoe Test
An extreme example of not listening to instinct
Process, Root Cause Analysis and Defect Prevention
Blame Game
Another Smell: Duplicate functionality providers
This is Canada. We get snow here.
SDTimes – February 15, 2008
A Stale Site is a Buggy Site
Release – The end-of-project non event
SDTimes and Software Test & Performance
Are pre-defined release dates bad for Quality?
Bugs in unit test frameworks – oh the irony
“Path” Testing
Tester to Developer Ratios
Coaching and Testing – Skill Progression Charts
Boosting your Credibility
Three Cs of Testing
Social Objects and Testing
2 SDTimes and an ST&P
On Using Excel
Installation testing
Lessons learned from a broken dryer
Questions that Pack Punch
What is in your testing kit?
Tracing paper as a test tool. Who knew?
Is ‘Highly Repeatable’ deserving of its evil reputation?
Now Slower and with More Bugs!
Cheat Sheets
Using your senses as oracles
Agile 2008 Proposals
An Actionable List
12/01/2007 SDTimes and 12/2007 STP
Ethics and Job Satisfaction
ST&P 2007 Testers Choice
5 Questions With… Me
Checking Java versions from a batch script
Tuning FindBugs (with Maven)
GLSEC 2007 – I18N and L10N (a technical primer)
Eye Tracking Rules
SDTimes – November 15, 2007
GLSEC 2007 – Program Notes
GLSEC 2007 – Testing Ruby on Rails
Databases for Testers
Performance Testing with JMeter
STP – November 2007
Vertical integration in the testing market
Static, Bad. Dynamic, Good.
Selenium presentation
Leader Machines
More testing lessons from building a shed
Injecting yourself into the Toronto Tech Community
So you call yourself an engineer
MS Tester Center
A new ility – sustainability
A new static analysis heuristic
Storing Credit Card Data
What building a shed teaches you about testing
GTAC 2007 – Slides
Exploits of a Mom
On Test Cases
George Bernard Shaw quote on cynicism
Stats 202 – Statistical Aspects of Data Mining
Top Web Development Mistakes
Software Test & Performance – October 2007
SD Times – October 1, 2007
BAD – Broken As Designed
Introducing xUnit.NET
The Art of Evangelism
Specifying Tools in Job Advertisements
Permissiveness
Application Phone Home
The difference between How and Why
An idea on creating test cases for page elements
Passwords in the Clear
Consistency
3 types of metrics
Organic Growth
The Agile Roundtable Facilitation Method
How to upgrade your Java version (?)
Singletons
Managing Time
Before you hire a tester (.net edition)
Before you hire a tester (a list for start-ups)
I’m speaking at GLSEC2007
The Hidden Workplace
What every web tester should know
SD Times – September 1, 2007
Automation alone
I’ll be your mirror
I’m an irrational tester (lessons on Craigslist)
MSN
Ahhh, unix (developer notes revisited)
Questions you should be asking in an interview
Strict Model-View Seperation
Testing javascript
Please precompile your JSP pages
Browser detection and browser detection detection
Quality through Innovation
Cultural background and testing prowess
Automated resource bundle inspection
GST/HST and QST Format Verification
PMD, IntegerInstantiation and a Red Herring
SDTimes – August 15, 2007
Where in the org chart is the Build Manager?
Innovation
Interacting with Oracle through Jython
JSR 305: Annotations for Software Defect Detection
Can your customers tell you about bugs?
Don’t Trust the Client – Time
Displaying the classpath in Jython
Scott Berkun – The Myths of Innovation
SD Times – August 1, 2007
CAST2007 – Proceedings now online
Case sensitivity
Testing video games
Shirts updated
Passwords
How long will it take?
YSlow – Another reason why Firefox is great for testing
STP August 2007
The Google QA Hiring Process – The Phone Screen
Currency Abbreviation Codes
Notes from SDTimes and STP
Meta Frameworks
Where should the AST be heading?
Controlling Linksys filters through Python
Can we please rat-hole the certification issue?
A developer note in the wild
The LAWST Facilitation Method
Conferences on a Budget
TWST3 – Pierre Garigue and Tommas Marchese
CAST2007 – Day Two
CAST2007 – Testing Exhibition
CAST2007 – AST 2008 Vision
CAST2007 – Lightning Talks
CAST2007 – Harry Robinson
CAST2007 – Keith Stobie
CAST2007 – Day One
CAST2007 – AST Annual Meeting
CAST2007 – Ryan Gerard
CAST2007 – Esther Derby
CAST2007 – Mike Kelly
CAST2007 – Lee Copeland
Everything old is new again
Metrics – 6/30/07
Merchandise now available
Miscellaneous – 6/28/07
Making sure you are not considered spam
TWST3 – Cem Kaner
TWST3 – Morven Gentleman
i18n conferences
On heuristics
TWST3 – Peggy Collier and Josh Assad
TWST3 – Jon Steinberg
TWST3 – Paul Holland
TWST3 – SLIME
WS-Testing
New CPU architectures means new headaches?
Schedule; for the rest of the year. So far.
26 Reasons What You Think is Right is Wrong
Another lacrosse analogy
GTAC 2007 attendee applications now open
CAST Tutorials or AYE
O’Reilly Shortcuts
Required reading (or I will kill you!)
Slipstreaming a Windows install
Bonus Links for May 20, 2007
Links for May 20, 2007
Optimizing Flash
How Doctors Think
Offshoring vs. Nearshoring
Lacrosse and Testing
If Architects had to work like Web Designers
Magazine subscriptions
Types of Environment
JSP size limit
A note (okay, rant) on comments
Is Jython the ultimate test framework language?
Be devious
CAST Registration now open
A poor man’s for loop in Selenium
The ‘Build your own lightsaber’ heuristic
QA102 Course Material
Exploratory Programming
Python 3000
QA102 – Scripting for Test Engineers
A/B Testing
Pairwise Testing: A Best Practice That Isn’t
Designed for Testability
Software Metrics – V
Ensuring Database Quality
Links for 01/31/07
Software Metrics – IV
Really Bad Powerpoint
A mnemonic on how to approach a testing task
Software Metrics – III
To those reading by RSS
Source Code Metrics – II
Links for 01/23/07
Source Code Metrics – I
Test Management – The Basic Blocks
QA101 slides now in SVN
Validating XML with Jython
New Years Mailing List Catch-up – I
Regarding Wikis
A new year, a new job
Security Transformation
Using Bugzilla for managing change
Lessons learned from dealing with iframes
Test Case Inspiration
Adam’s Quality Manifesto
So, you’ve got yourself an interview with me
Tomcat
Staging vs. Production environments
Secrets of Greatness
More on team roles
Testing Attitudes
Cem Kaner at TASSQ
Come work for me
Random Articles – 7/18/06
Watts Humphrey: Managing the Software Process – Chapter 12
Random Articles – 2
Measures of Maturity – CMM(a): Computer Maturity Model (adam)
Random Articles – Part 1
Secrets of Success – Teamwork
Managing Data from the bottom up
Cross Site Tracing (XST)
CVS Keywords
Slowdown
The Case against NULL
A Life on the Edge
Feelings of Ownership
Clustering on a single piece of hardware
A blast from the (near) past
tailing the windows event log
Customer vs. customer
Different Target Audiences
Watts Humphrey: Managing the Software Process – Chapter 10
Post format?
Testing Models
The Golden Copy
When Do You Quit Security Testing and Ship the App?
A spoonful of sugar
3 Pillars of Testing – Pillar Three: Traceability
Generating Random Permutations
CMMi – 04/19/06
Which School are you?
3 Pillars of Testing – Pillar Two: Repeatability
Testing Applications that will be Audited
3 Pillars of Testing – Pillar One: Auditability and Accountability
Behind Closed Doors (Review)
Akimbi Slingshot
laptop died
Amazon.ca
Agile Estimating and Planning
CMMi Catch-up (Day 6)
CMMi Catch-up (Day 5)
Candidate Selection
CMMi Catch-up (Day 4)
A Sample (SDK) Test Plan
CMMi Catch-up (Day 3)
CMMi Catch-up (Day 2)
Watts Humphrey: Managing the Software Process – Chapter 9
Watts Humphrey: Managing the Software Process – Chapter 8
CMMi Catch-up (Day 1)
On Staffing
Consistency
Welcome ‘home’
Schedules
Done and DONE-Done
Where are the Heroes of Quality?
A smattering of random(ish) thoughts
Clausewitz and Testing
Documentation Reviews in distributed teams (or Get your Reviewers a Cool Photocopier)
Section 508
Web Design Pitfalls
API testing in a Web 2.0 world
How to clean your (MSSQL) database
controlling pyunit tests
More on virtualization
Sync ‘n Run
LOUD
Test Documentation set
We’re on the same team here
Google
Fisher
A Test Naming Convention
A butterfly in Africa…
Developer note detection
Hardware-ing a QA group (part 2)
Should I log this as a bug?
Hardware-ing a QA group
Adam’s Laws of Bug Levels
QA is not just Testing
A Definition of Quality