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. … [Read more...] about Tawney Gowan: A New Colleague is Born
Satisfice Blog
Nervous About Wolfram
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 … [Read more...] about Nervous About Wolfram
Michelle Smith: True Test Leadership
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 … [Read more...] about Michelle Smith: True Test Leadership
Quality is Dead #2: The Quality Creation Myth
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 … [Read more...] about Quality is Dead #2: The Quality Creation Myth
James Tam: Customer Service that Works
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 … [Read more...] about James Tam: Customer Service that Works
Yaron Sinai Says Stop Thinking, Stupid Tester
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 … [Read more...] about Yaron Sinai Says Stop Thinking, Stupid Tester
The IMVU Shuffle
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 … [Read more...] about The IMVU Shuffle
Quality is Dead #1: The Hypothesis
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 … [Read more...] about Quality is Dead #1: The Hypothesis
This Blog is Like…
...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 … [Read more...] about This Blog is Like…
WebGreeter Fails Turing Test
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. … [Read more...] about WebGreeter Fails Turing Test