Upcoming Courses Led by Edward Tufte

I've written and verbalized often about Edward Tufte and his work. He will be personally leading some one-day courses. Wired magazine calls his courses "One visionary day....the insights of this class lead to new levels of understanding both for creators and viewers of visual displays."

In addition to the course attendees also receive 4 of his books.

For more information please visit his website.

-William

The 7th Annual QAI & QAAM Regional Conference

The 7th Annual QAI & QAAM Regional Conference is near, starting Wednesday September 10th. From the site:

"The theme for this year’s conference is “How to Manage and Control your IT Projects”. A key focuses for the conference are program management, testing and project oversight throughout the entire Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). As we all know cost, schedule and quality are key drivers for any project, but assuring we built the right product is paramount to a successful project."

TO see that daily breakdown, check out the conference schedule.

-William

Sourceforge 2008 Community Choice Awards

Sourceforge.net has released its 2008 Community Choice Award winners.

Not surprisingly, Openoffice.org took quite a few awards. I personally use Openoffice at home, Videolan (VLC) and Notepad++, an incredibly handy notepad-like uber text editor.

Also, Sourceforge is a great place to find many varieties of open source testing tools including OpenSTA, JUnit and many, many others.

-William

The Software Behind the Mars Phoenix Lander

I caught this neat interview with Peter Gluck who is a NASA (JPL) engineer who discusses the software used on the Phoenix lander. He discusses some pretty interesting facts around how they develop, test and update the software used on something that is built in earth and then sent hurtling millions of miles away to make a perfect landing on Mars.

Here's an interesting snip from the article about the development process:

"...we have a lifecycle that we use at JPL where we go through a requirements definition and then we go into our preliminary design phase and then we go into a detail design phase. And then at the end of detail design, you actually have most of the components ready to be assembled and you start to assemble and integrate and test the vehicle. And so roughly speaking, you spend something like nine months in your requirements definition and then another year in your design phase, maybe a year and a half. And then you spend a year to a year and a half in your test phase. And then you launch it."

Its a great read and highly recommended.

-William

The Piñata Scenario

A colleague of mine and most excellent writer Michael Bolton recently wrote a great article for the March 2008 edition of Better Software Magazine titled "How Much is Enough?". In that article, Michael discusses a number of heuristics that suggest whether to stop testing or keep going. One part in particular caught my eye:

Piñata: When the candy starts cascading from a piñata, we typically stop whacking it. If we see something reasonably spectacular when we’re testing—a crash or hang, screen or data corruption, behavior that we can’t understand or explain—we might believe that we've found a problem that’s dramatic enough to justify stopping. Might there be an interesting piece of candy still stuck in the piñata?

This poses an interesting situation. Some testers may whack the piñata, see the candy fall out and stop. Other may perhaps give it a few more whacks for good measure to tease out the remaining candy and stop there. Myself? I don't stop.

In fact the last time I actually touched a piñata was at a neighbor's house for their sons 7th birthday. The attending kids (in order of smallest to biggest, of course) took their turns with the stick and the eventual, inevitable avalanche of confectionary guts spilled out. The children pounced upon the sugary pile like rabid weasels, happily scooping the booty into little baggies with their names on them.

Myself? I waited until the carnage had passed. And there, laying on the ground in 2 pieces was the piñata. I gathered them up and proceeded to take it apart, wanting to see exactly how the artisan who created the thing was able to take a single piece of cardboard and fold it origami-like into a donkey. Or was it an elephant? No matter.

The point here is that as a tester, I find myself not stopping when logic may dictate I should stop. I want to keep going - to understand why the piñata broke the way it did, learning and answering questions along the way.

-William

Perfect Software — And Other Illusions About Testing

Based on the most recent Developsense newsletter and the fact that he will be a CAST 2008 keynote speaker, I've gone ahead and pre-ordered Jerry Weinberg's book Perfect Software - And Other Illusions About Testing.

"Jerry Weinberg, author of The Psychology of Computer Programming and more than forty nonfiction books, sets out to disprove destructive notions about testing and testers in Perfect Software—And Other Illusions About Testing. Avoiding a dry textbook treatment of a highly technical pursuit, Weinberg provides clear problem-solving advice in plain language, suitable for managers, customers, and users as well as developers and testers. Real-world software and management conflicts play out and instruct through short stories and retrospective Common Mistakes sections."

This should make for a great read. I'll post a book review once I've had time to read it

-William

Register for CAST

The early bird registration cutoff for the upcoming CAST conference in Toronto is May 31st. Please head over to the CAST Registration site and get yourself registered.

This year's conference is shaping up to be a brilliant event. Check out the details of the program as there are many folks I respect and admire presenting.

Keep on testin'

-William