Reading the signs on the wall

By on July 14, 2008 in Best Practices, Curious & Off-Topic

My laptop died today. It got stuck in mid work; I tried rebooting and it started displaying a consistent blue-screen with the message “Unmountable boot volume” written in bold white letters. The annoying thing is that I saw it coming.A couple of weeks ago I noticed that it had started getting extra hot after short [...]

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Smoke & Mirrors…? – What exactly do we gain from Process Certifications?

By on July 11, 2008 in Curious & Off-Topic, Test Process

I ran into someone looking for information about the CMMI. He was interested in the criteria that placed a company (or better defined, its process) under Level 3 instead of Level 2. This reminded me of past times when I took part (and even lead) the certification processes in similar Organizations. I don’t intend to [...]

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How should we train our starting testers?

By on July 7, 2008 in Management, On-Going Improvement

A couple of QA & Testing Forums around the Web have been discussing the question of how to train a tester, especially during the beginning of his/her career. This is one of the most important and challenging question any good QA Manager should ask himself; if not for the sake of his Company and his [...]

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There’s no such thing as a Free Lunch – my latest Bugzilla war-story

By on July 3, 2008 in Bug Reporting, Tools

Here I come again, another customer who asks for QA Process Consulting. Again, like many start-ups, they’ve been using Excel to manage their issues but feel they outgrew it and now need a “real tool”. Again, 10 minutes into the tool evaluation meeting someone says those frightening words I’ve heard at least 5 times before [...]

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Agile Testing – the side of the story R&D Managers tend to forget

By on June 30, 2008 in Best Practices, Test Process

Is your company running at least one Agile project these days? I would be very surprised if it wouldn’t; but the real question is how has this modified the way you – the tester – are doing things differently in order to match your ways to this “new beat”. My experience with Agile Testing has [...]

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Business Process Testing – are you doing it already?

By on June 26, 2008 in Best Practices, Test Process

This week I took part in the SIGIST 2008 yearly conference in Tel Aviv. Like many other events, it was a great place to interact with other testers and get new perspectives on old tricks we managed to forget along the way. One of the sessions I participated in was around Business Process Testing (BPT) [...]

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