Archive for the ‘work’ Category

« Older Entries

The New Gig – Look at the Wiki Waves

Monday, April 27th, 2009

The ritual for new hires at a past company included asking the new hire to copy a stack of papers containing the “shared knowledge and lore” of the organization. The new hire spent most of the first two days filling out HR paperwork, making copies, and reading the copied material. This kept them out of the hair of the manager/mentor who probably had a bunch of fires to put out from the weekend.

Fast-forward to today, where I was pointed at the wiki and the pages referencing ‘New Engineer’ and ‘New QA’ necessary information, giving the lead of my new group time to figure out what to do with me. (I’m in training for the next 3 weeks)

I can speed-skim with the best of them, and I noticed an interesting pattern. Clusters of last-modified dates.

Bunches of pages were updated in the past week. Another clump in the past 2 months. Then another cluster 6 months ago. More clusters at 2 years and 3.5 years in the past.

The clusters seem to be thematic, too. Almost like they correlate with starts of new approaches, or changes in approaches.

Hmmmm. Cultural archaeology can be such fun.

Posted in Uncategorized, work | Comments Off

OSTATLI a success, and a lot of fun

Friday, February 6th, 2009

Yesterday, I was one of the attendees at the Open Source Test Automation Tool Love-In, hosted by Elisabeth Hendrickson at the QualityTree offices here in the Bay Area.

Other attendees included Dale Emery, Chris Sims, Jeffrey Frederick, Ken Pier, and Kevin Lawrence.

We chatted a bit about test automation philosophy, told war stories, and played with the tools.

I watched Elisabeth set up a RobotFramework test for some ATDD work she is doing with a new website. When she showed the “fixture” code and the interface capabilities of the tool, I was hooked. I’m going to write up some tests for the big-app-at-work next week.

Kevin Lawrence gave a demo of what he accomplished after 10 minutes of playing with CubicTest. It reminded me of the graphical workflow test for rails Brian Marick was working on.

Last night, I managed to get seleniumrc up and running on my MacBook, then this morning I got cubictest installed and running in eclipse. I think I’ll use it to write tests so I can refactor my ip address validator (the one with the interesting bug I’m keeping in, but the annoying bugs I want to fix).

Finally, Elisabeth shared a pointer to UISpec4J as a good unit test library for Swing.

Lots of other tool goodness happened, too.

Thanks again, Elisabeth, for calling and hosting the event.

Posted in testing, work | 3 Comments »

Test Data Management

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

A quick hint about managing test data for “enterprise” applications.

Does the application under test rely on a large central database?

If so, is that large central database backed up on a regular basis?

If so, can you get access to the backup files?

For some testing tasks, it might be easier to just load a new database instance from those backups than to create and populate a database from scratch.

In one case, we dropped, truncated, and pruned a number of tables from the backup, then created a new backup file. A much smaller backup file. One that loaded in one hour instead of many hours.

Posted in Uncategorized, testing, work | Comments Off

Things to accept

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

I was reading Reader’s Digest, and noticed a quote attributed to Brendan Fraser:

Everybody has bad hair decades.

I’ve accepted that 2000-2009 is mine.

Other ideas I’ve had to work at accepting in the past include

  • Not everybody is as passionate about work stuff as I am
    • some are more
    • some are less
    • some are passionate about different aspects of work
  • This is ok
  • Sometimes I should slow down because I’m not giving people enough time to learn what I’m doing
  • Sometimes I should not slow down because going fast is a good example to set
  • Sometimes I know which one applies for a given situation
  • No email reply is so urgent that I should send it without review and at least 5 minutes reflection on how the recipients might interpret it.

Posted in work | Comments Off

Requirements Testing

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

Well, that takes care of one counter-example. What other exceptions can you think of?

Posted in personal, testing, work | Comments Off

What he said

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

Jonathan Kohl is right. Often.

I suspect when he’s not right, he’s wrong. Which is a good thing.

Posted in testing, work | Comments Off

2 process thoughts

Saturday, February 2nd, 2008

First thought:

One of the software development teams I work with has been using xp-style iteration planning and velocity measuring, with cards and points and walls and such.

I was standing in front of the wall, talking with one of the coaches, when the following dawned on me:

I can tell a product owner that by investing x points into making legacy code more maintainable, the team could subtract 1 point from the estimate on each of the cards for stories in that code area.

So if there are, or will be, more than x cards of that type, then it might be worth it to invest the time to improve the code.

Second thought:

Corey Ladas posted:

There are no a priori best practices

There are only the practices you are using now.

And practices that are better than the ones you are using now.

I’m always impressed by the simple revelations.

Posted in testing, work | Comments Off

Books I read in High School English

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008
  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
  • I Heard the Owl Call My Name
  • Never Cry Wolf

I read these books because they were required for one of my high school English classes. I suspect each has many lessons for testers, or at least stuff I can put forth as what I think would be a worthwhile lesson for a tester.

I’m not sure what I would do with A Tale of Two Cities, though.

Posted in testing, work | Comments Off

Taking stock

Tuesday, December 25th, 2007

I no longer have the corner office. Neither does my boss, so it’s ok.

We moved earlier this month into the reconfigured cube farm on the other side of the floor. I do have a window seat, and can see the bay without craning my neck. The little things are important.

The new guy started earlier this month. Now that I’ve got time to bring him up to speed, I can bring him up to speed. I’m glad the next two weeks have the potential to be quiet, so the world might not change too much while I’m explaining it.

Testing is a good idea. I believe in it. QA is a good idea. I believe in it, too. Testing and QA are so much easier to do, and provide so much more value, when the following things are managed well: people, process, and projects.

“Managed well” does not necessarily mean managed centrally. Nor does it exclude that possibility.

I now have a USB rocket launcher, and I know how to use it. This may relate to my comments about stuff being managed well.

Posted in work | Comments Off

The third option

Thursday, July 26th, 2007

Jerry Weinberg’s rule of three came into play today.

I went to the kitchen at work to get a cup of coffee, but all the coffee pots were empty. So I set up the machine to brew more coffee, but I mistakenly pushed the “brew a half pot” button instead of the “brew a full pot” button. And I didn’t notice that fact until the coffee stopped flowing out of the machine and the pot was only half full.

Option 1: ignore it. Just pour a cup of coffee from the half-full pot, and remember next time to push the full pot button.

Option 2: start over. Pour the half-pot of coffee into the sink, toss the grounds, and start from scratch, which would result in a full pot of coffee sitting at the machine.

Posted in personal, testing, work | 1 Comment »

« Older Entries