The CAST testing conference is happening in Colorado Springs, July 13-16. I mention this for two reasons:
1. I will be teaching a testing tutorial there. I also will be wandering around with my various testing games and challenges hoping to do them with anyone who wants to see what I mean by “testing skills.”
2. CAST [...]

Take a look at the screen shot, below. This is from my first five minutes of playing with Wolfram/Alpha. Do you see what’s wrong with it? I’ll tell you in a minute…
Wolfram/Alpha is the new search engine that isn’t so much a search engine as a find-interesting-ways-to-analyze-data-and-show-it-to-me engine. It’s a closed system, as far as [...]

…a radio call-in show. It is not an open public forum.
Sometimes I get complaints about how I handle comments. I received a quite thoughtful and persuasive complaint just a few hours ago. There is a teeny-tiny link on the front page of my blog that goes to my policy on comments, but I suspect few [...]

Beware, if you visit WebGreeter.com a disturbing thing will happen. You will be immediately accosted by what appears to be a chatbot, but is apparently a human doing a creepy impression of a chatbot. This cyborg thing will ask you for your contact information. If you give it to them, they may use it right [...]

Check out Is there a problem here?
This is just what our craft needs. This wonderful, simple service brought to us by Ben Simo (AKA QualityFrog) documents bugs found in the field. I can use this in training new testers.
There is a little problem with it: It’s biased toward reporting problems that are vividly depicted in [...]

If you ever wondered what happens when you quit LinkedIn and then come back again, I can report that all your contacts will be gone. I expected that. But I didn’t expect that the recommendations I wrote for other people would also disappear. To those for whom I wrote recommendations– sorry! I thought they would [...]

Now that I have symmetrical 4 megabit Internet access at my island office, I am able to offer live 90-minute webinars. Using GoToMeeting (a pretty good screensharing service that can connect with up to 10 people), I can speak to any small group. I am able to respond to questions and demonstrate some kinds of [...]

Tobbe Ryber (English pronunciation: Tobey Ruber) is the most famous Swedish tester I know. He is finally blogging in English, so I’m sure he’s about to become even better known.
Tobbe is a context-driven thinker who has a lot to say about test design tactics. He also innovates with tester training exercises and with developing community [...]

Ben Kelly, who works in Japan, is reviewing the Japanese translation of my book, Lessons Learned in Software Testing. He writes:
Each lesson is numbered as per the original, but rather than ‘lesson’, they use the word tessoku, which means ‘Inviolable Rule’ or ‘Ironclad Regulation’
Ben goes on to say that it was probably a marketing decision [...]

I’ve been confused about Twitter. When I browse tweets I see disjointed conversations about silly and banal subjects. Twitter has seemed to me like a celebration of shallowness. What’s the big deal?
This article has turned me around. The big deal is the present moment, the zeitgeist of the infinitesimal now. Instant reactions and the emergence [...]

Ron Jeffries, one of the capital “A” Agile people, provides a great example of context-imperial talk in his critique of the context-driven approach to methodology:
Well, my dear little children, I’ve got bad news for you. It is your precious context that is holding you back. It is your C-level Exeuctives and high-level managers who can’t [...]

Over on my self-education blog, I’ve posted something that might help new testers, too. It’s an example of a technical report. It details the process of fixing a cheese grater. The report is two pages long, then I wrote a six page commentary on how I wrote it.

I just tried to use the automated support system at Paypal…
Sarah - PayPal :
Hello, I’m Sarah and I’m here to answer your questions about PayPal. Even though I’d like to be a real person, I’m not. I’m programmed to answer your questions. How can I help you?
You :
How do I change my security questions?
Sarah - [...]

Kevin Rogers of Infotech convinced me that I should migrate my server to a managed service. He handled the whole thing for an amazingly low price, too.
Now, I will be a bit harder to hack. But there may be a few glitches still to work out. For instance, during the move strange characters somehow became [...]

My blog has been down because I’m experiencing a hack attack. I may have to do something radical to secure my server, like rebuild the whole thing from scratch. It just goes to show how important testing is. The system I’m running is so complex that the security experts I’ve consulted all tell me to [...]