May 2008
A Place to Put Things →
At the AA-FTT workshop last October, I did this lightning talk titled “A Place to Put Things.” In it, I propose standardizing on places to put different kinds of information associated…
May 31st
Performance Testing of Distributed File Systems at... →
Posted by Rajat Jain and Marc Kaplan, Infrastructure Test Engineering Google is unique in that we develop most of our software infrastructure from scratch inside the company….
May 31st
We Need Better Testing Bloggers →
I don’t understand the mentality of bloggers like this guy. His view of the history of testing is a fantasy that seems designed to insult people who study testing. It applies at most to certain…
May 30th
AST Instructors’ Tutorial at CAST in Toronto →
This post is largely copied from Cem Kaner’s blog because I saw no need to re-write the same information :) You’ve read about the Association for Software Testing’s free software testing…
May 30th
Python - rrdpy - Round Robin Databases (RRDTool) →
(all scripts and code referenced in this post can be found here: http://code.google.com/p/rrdpy/source/browse/trunk) “RRDtool is the Open Source industry standard, high performance data logging…
May 30th
Advice to Developers from a Test Manager →
Technorati Tags: testing,qa,quality assurance,engineering A good friend pointed out that a blog on advice to developers from an experienced test manager would be helpful. With 13 years of tech…
May 30th
Python - Yahoo Stock Quotes - Historical Pricing →
I recently received a patch to my ystockquote.py module for retrieving historical stock prices. It takes a start and end date (YYYMMDD) and a ticker symbol, and returns pricing data (a nested…
May 29th
New Blog - Switched To Blogger - First Post →
I was sick of the hassles of hosting my own blog, so I just switched to Blogger. All of my old feeds should remain the same… so if you are already subscribed, you are all set. The old blog…
May 29th
Rotation - An effective way of providing long-term... →
I hesitate to say that I’ve been sitting on this post for a while. Let’s just say I’ve been giving it some thought. At my current place of work, because we host our product online the testers,…
May 29th
AST Instructors’ Tutorial at CAST in Toronto →
You’ve read about the Association for Software Testing’s free software testing courses. Now find out how you can get involved in teaching these for AST, for your company, or independently. This…
May 29th
Podcast on Watir →
I just listened to a podcast where Željko Filipin talks with Bret Pettichord about Watir. This is an easy to listen to and informative podcast about Watir. I really admire and appreciate…
May 29th
Pex 0.5 Available for Download →
Pex (from the Microsoft Research Lab) has finally been released the public. Pex 0.5 can be downloaded here. What is Pex? “Pex (Program EXploration) is a white-box test generation…
May 29th
TotT: The Invisible Branch →
Full statement coverage may be necessary for good testing coverage, but it isn’t sufficient. Two places where statement coverage will be inadequate are branches and loops. In this episode, we’ll…
May 28th
Mission Control →
Do you know what your mission is? Some of you may be saying “To boundary test Feature X”. Some may be describing what you came into this lifetime to do. Others of you may be immersed in the process…
May 28th
Testing.com URLs no longer work →
I’ve sold testing.com, partly because I got offered enough money, partly because exampler.com really reflects better what I do today, and partly because I like to force myself not to cling to the…
May 28th
Reduce Reuse Recycle →
I toured Singapore for about 10 days this month. I don’t know why my eyes kept catching signboards that suggested people to Reduce, Reuse and Recycle plastics. I think it was because I am from India….
May 28th
Watir Podcast →
In the first episode Željko Filipin talks with Bret Pettichord about Watir and what it does and doesn’t do well. Bret describes how people are building frameworks with Watir and the reasons why…
May 28th
Have you ever done acceptance testing? →
Link to a survey about acceptance testing you might have done, either on the Delivery side or the Customer side, to be used as a base for research by Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices team.
May 27th
FlexMock and RubyCocoa →
I struggled using mocks in RubyCocoa. Here’s what I learned, using FlexMock. I’m writing some tests to understand and explain the RubyCocoa interface to key-value observing. Key-value observing…
May 27th
Common Software Errors - Testing Errors →
This is the appendix from the best-selling book Testing Computer Software, 2nd ed. Copyright © 1988 by Cem Kaner Copyright © 1993 by Cem Kaner, Jack Falk, Hung Quoc Nguyen This is part 13 of…
May 27th
PyRAFT - Automation Framework for Testing →
May 26th
CASTing For Participants, Part 2 →
Some months ago I posted about CAST 2008, how it’s not your typical conference, how gobs of Smart Testers will be attending, and how you probably should attend too. The program is up now, and…
May 25th
Intro to Ad Quality Test Challenges →
Alek Icev Ads Quality Test Engineering Manager I’d like to take a second and introduce you to the team testing the ads ranking algorithms. We’d like to think that we had a hand in the webs shift…
May 24th
Incremental backups to Amazon S3 →
Based on this great blog post by Tim McCormack, I managed to write some scripts that back up files to Amazon S3. The files are encrypted with GnuPG and rsync-ed to S3 using a Python-based tool…
May 23rd
Unit Testing ++ →
(Yes, I need to follow up on tech debt. Still …) Not to many years ago, Brian Marick pointed out that you can tell when a product has “crossed the chasm” into main stream when the first…
May 23rd
Should the Testers Learn Programming? →
May 23rd
Sponsorship opportunities for CAST2008 still... →
There are still sponsorship opportunities available for CAST08, the annual conference of the Association for Software Testing.The AST is a non-profit professional association with a mission of…
May 23rd
Software error and the meltdown of US finances →
“LONDON, May 21 (Reuters) - A computer coding error led Moody’s Investors Service to assign incorrect triple-A ratings to a complex debt product that came to mark the peak of the credit boom, the…
May 22nd
Lower impact travel →
After flying in to Boston’s Logan Airport and lining up for the taxi queue, I was surprised to see a sign saying that I could request a hybrid vehicle. And in fact, I saw a hybrid in the queue about…
May 22nd
I am Dilbertized! →
May 22nd
What’s on my mac →
a quick, partial list of stuff I’ve installed, and use, on my mac: Aquamacs emacs Backdrop/MenuShade/Mousepose 2 (for screen casts) Carbon Copy Cloner Chicken of the VNC Colloquy/Snak/Adium…
May 22nd
Everyone needs a cryptic slogan →
I’ve been talking to Jason and Jonathan, the post-Agile guys, about post-Agile. I don’t get it, but that’s OK. What it made me realize is that a properly obscure name for the kind of…
May 21st
Bloglines Continues to Lead Google Reader →
Heather Hopkins of Hitwise has a new post for all you Blogliners out there. She’s a VP of Research at Hitwise, a leading web analytics firm. She writes, “It (Bloglines) is the most popular…
May 21st
My position on Tech Debt - I →
For the workshop on technical debt, everyone has to write a position paper, give a case study, do a talk, OR do a tutorial. (“One of the above.”) That includes me. So I have decided to write two…
May 21st
CAST - I’m going conference mad →
Mad, I tell you. Well, maybe not, but I’m making an effort to get out and about. I’m going to be in Japan for a couple of weeks in early July, so when I heard about the CAST conference…
May 21st
Exploratory Testing on Chat →
Posted by Joel Hynoski, Test Manager, Chat Clients Testing Google Talk is challenging — we have multiple client implementations, between the Google Talk client, the Google Talk Gadget, and Gmail…
May 20th
Is There A Problem Here? →
msn video To use this product, you need to install free software This product requires Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 with Microsoft Media Players 10 and Macromedia…
May 20th
Conference of the Association of Software Testing... →
The third annual Conference of the Association of Software Testing (CAST) 2008 in Toronto, July 14-16. Early bird registration ends May 30. Here’s what Michael Bolton has written about it: A…
May 20th
Political activism →
As you’ve been able to see for a while, from his campaign picture on my blog, I support Barack Obama for U.S. president. This blog isn’t the vehicle that I want to use for political discussion….
May 19th
Compiling Python 2.5 with SSL support →
If you compile Python 2.5.x from source, you need to jump through some hoops so that SSL support is enabled. Googling around, I found Patrick Altman’s excellent blog post talking about this very…
May 19th
Next Watir Austin Meeting: Jim Matthews' Link... →
The next meeting of the Austin Watir Users Group will be this Wednesday, May 21. Jim Matthews will be speaking about his link checker, a web crawler optimized for testing that he has released as…
May 19th
Scott Barber and AST now on Twitter →
Recently I succumbed to peer pressure and tried Twitter. Twitter is a “micro-blogging” site. It took me a while to figure out what that meant and what value it has, but after trying it, I get it…
May 19th
Common Software Errors - Source, Version, and ID... →
This is the appendix from the best-selling book Testing Computer Software, 2nd ed. Copyright © 1988 by Cem Kaner Copyright © 1993 by Cem Kaner, Jack Falk, Hung Quoc Nguyen This is part 12 of…
May 19th
TDD in PL/SQL →
PL/SQL has unit testing support and tooling, but my sense is that it’s far from the world of Java or Ruby. In most modern OO languages unit testing is just a part of the landscape. TDD is…
May 17th
The Tri-Cities in Washington State →
My Mother and Father met when she was teaching and he was working in tri-cities area, and as a child I spent many happy summers there with my Grand Parents. This morning, I saw that a company in the…
May 16th
TotT: Using Dependancy Injection to Avoid... →
It’s hard to test code that uses singletons. Typically, the code you want to test is coupled strongly with the singleton instance. You can’t control the creation of the singleton object because…
May 16th
Going back to the CAST conference →
I’ve just registered for CAST 2008, the third year for the Conference of the Association for Software Testing. This time it’s in Toronto, July 14-16. Let me know if you’re going too. Trying to…
May 16th
Registration for CAST 2008 now open! →
The 3rd Annual Conference of the Association of Software Testing (CAST) 2008 Toronto, Ontario, Canada, July 14-16, 2008 Beyond the Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Approaches to…
May 15th
So You’re Trying to Automate Tests for a Legacy... →
…and it isn’t cooperating? I sympathize. I recently fought my way through the process of automating a test to reproduce a bug on a legacy(*) web application that had no IDs on any of the…
May 15th
I am a Software Test Engineer. I am a Software... →
Only the creativity of the tester limits what or who the tester can be.
May 15th