This comes from an ISTQB advertisement they spammed me with, today:

“To ensure the quality of any software system, testers and QA professionals must thoroughly test the product. But how do you know that these tests are effective? If your team is conducting ad hoc, informal tests with little guidance or planning, the quality of the [...]

A salesman from G2 Test Labs just called me. He said he was from India. He wanted to know if my testing company needed to partner with an offshore lab like his. I’m writing this now, while the memory of the conversation is fresh.
After he made his brief brief opening monologue I asked him “I’m [...]

Matt Heusser wrote an interesting post about “boutique testers.” I like the idea of boutique testers (boutique intellectuals of all kinds, actually, which is why I wrote my new book.) And I am an example of one. The testing I’ve done in recent years has been mostly on court cases or part of coaching testers, [...]

I’ve released a new video, which is a whimsical look at a serious subject: explaining exploratory testing.
In the video, my brother and I independently test an “Easy Button” for 10 minutes. Neither of us had seen the other’s test session. Then I edited the 20 minutes of total testing down to a 4 minute highlight [...]

(Since this pertains to both self-education AND technical work, I’m posting this on both of my blogs)
Randy Ingermanson has an interesting approach to writing fiction. It’s called the Snowflake Method. It looks interesting, but I won’t be following it in my work.
First, Don’t Follow
I only use my own methods. That is to say I’m happy [...]

Pradeep Soundararajan got threatened with lawyers when he criticized Testing Experience magazine for being under the thumb of the ISTQB (for those who don’t yet know, the ISTQB are the guys who want to prevent you from getting work as a tester unless you first pass their silly test. They also plagiarized my definition of [...]

I’m well known for promoting philosophy. By philosopher, I mean someone skilled in the exploration, analysis and clarification of meaningful ideas and the processes by which we arrive at those ideas. Since software is made of ideas, that sounds like testing to me. So, if you want to be an excellent all-around tester, I think [...]

As you may know I’ve written a book about learning called Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar that will come out in September. It’s about learning in general, not just testing. I have a site and blog devoted to just that stuff.
As part of developing the ideas in the book, I’m also publishing videos. The first one [...]

I’m delighted to read Michelle Smith’s play-by-play description of how she is coaching new testers. Take a look.
Let me catalog the coolnesses:
1. “The team I work with was previously exposed to Rapid Software Testing. This exposure caused me to wonder what would happen if these new folks were exposed to some of these ideas [...]

One of the things that makes it hard to talk about quality software is that we first must overcome the dominating myth about quality, which goes like this: The quality of a product is built into it by its development team. They create quality by following disciplined engineering practices to engineer the source code so [...]

After Adam White’s test of of Rypple.com, I decided to try it myself. I soon ran into a fairly serious problem. I was able to try the service without registering, but when I tried to register, the system claimed I already was registered. Then when I tried to reset my password, it claimed I was [...]

The Factory School is that community of process people who believe testing benefits from eliminating the human element as much as possible. They wish to mechanize testing, and to condition the humans within it to see themselves as machines and emulate machines as much as possible. It’s an idea that has a number of advantages, [...]

Michael Bolton reported on our quick test of IMVU, whose development team brags about having no human-mediated test process before deploying their software to the field.
Some commentors have pointed out that the bugs we found in our twenty minute review weren’t serious– or couldn’t have been– because the IMVU  developers feel successful in what they [...]

Quality is dead in computing. Been dead a while, but like some tech’d up version of Weekend at Bernie’s, software purveyors are dressing up its corpse to make us believe computers can bring us joy and salvation.
You know it’s dead, too, don’t you? You long ago stopped expecting anything to just work on your desktop, [...]