When I was working on my API testing book, I noticed that the internet is broken. The Internet is Broken? Of course, the internet works just fine for many things, but in one particular way it is broken. The problem is, this broken piece of the internet is making it hard for you to advance in your career as a software tester. We have long known in the software testing industry that testing skills are not usually taught within the traditional educational institutions. Instead we have managed to use the internet to learn. But what if the internet is broken? Then what do we do? This article will b ..read more

IN 1944 the organization that would later become the CIA sent a manual to their operatives working in the underground resistance in Europe. The manual was called the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. It contained advice on how people could quietly sabotage enemy operations. Let’s see what we can learn from it. Much of it has to do with physical equipment, but for those of us in knowledge work the section on General Interference with Organizations and Production is instructive. Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions. This ..read more

I’m joining a new team at work, and as I do so I’ve taken some time to reflect on how I want to contribute to the team. Obviously some of that will be specific to the context of the team I am on, but I’ve also decided to publish some of my personal quality principles. These are the principles that currently guide the approach I take to quality and testing. Quality is a team sport. I don’t do all the testing. I might not even do most of the testing. My main goal is for the team to produce high quality software that makes customer’s lives better, and I believe that can only be accomplished if e ..read more

I have a problem when it comes to books. I want to read more than I have time to read. I’ve been able to mostly limit myself to just making insanely big Amazon wishlists, but sometimes I still can’t stop myself from buying books that “I’ll be sure to read soon.” This has lead to a stack of unread books, and this year I’m trying to make that stack a bit smaller. One of the books I recently started reading from my backlog is T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I’m not too far into the book yet, but in the introduction he talks about his process of writing it. He basically wrote the entire b ..read more

This world is a broken place. I recently read an article in my local newspaper about parents who lost their son to a drug overdose. The article was posted on Facebook and to read through the comments was hearwrenching. There were several other parents from my town that posted about how the healthcare system had failed them and their families and how they too had lost children to mental health and addictions. When I read something like that I start to wonder. There is so much brokeness and hurt in our world. There are so many systems that are broken and we are all struggling in our own ways, bu ..read more

Just for fun, I was recently reading about queuing theory (that’s a normal thing people do for fun right?). One of the things that you need to think about in queuing theory is scheduling policy. There are a number of different way that you can pick which object in the queue goes next. One scheduling policy that intuitively makes sense to me in the first-in, first-out policy. Basically, you would pick the thing that has been in the queue the longest as the one that goes next. But you can also choose to use a last-in, first-out policy. That doesn’t seem very fair to me. Think about waiting in a ..read more

I love learning new things. One of the reasons I started this blog was so that I could capture some of the things I’ve learned, but also so that I could learn more effectively. I have always found that for me one of the best ways to learn is by explaining the thing I’m learning to others. Blogging has allowed me to hone and deepen my thinking on a lot of things related to testing. In the last couple of years I have also branched out into learning and teaching with video courses. I’ve made courses on a number of different testing related topics, and in the process of doing that have been able t ..read more

I know I haven’t been writing on here much lately, but if you are looking to read something I wrote, check out my latest post on the TestProject blog. It’s about getting started with their open source Java SDK. I like learning new things and this was a fun way for me to learn a bit more about Java! As I say in that post  When you have a powerful tool, you don’t need to avoid it. Rather, you need to learn how to wield it well. It was fun diving in to learn how to better use that tool. Check out the full post here ..read more

From the outside, software development and magic are indistinguishable. Of course, with enough time you can understand how it works and for those of us who have made it through the frustration of learning to code, it’s really not all that magical after all. It’s just the application of a few simple rules. I kind of felt that way about schema. I’d heard the term before and I had seen errors come up in my code editor saying that I had a schema validation error. As far as could tell though this all came about by some sort of magic. Well, it turns out this kind of magic can also be learned. In my ..read more

A ..read more