Tejas Software Consulting Newsletter

My post on the Software Alchemy blog today - Lamenting Java-based test toolsдиваниerbium doped fiber. I’m sure I’ll get in trouble with Java enthusiasts.

On the Software Alchemy blog I say Thank You for Your Complaint to one of my critics. Enthusiastic supporters are great for morale. But constructive critics are even more valuable, because they help me improve myself.

My column Deconstructing Our Tools is featured on StickyMinds this week. It’s basically a listing of many different categories of tools. A tutorial I gave on the same subject at the SQuAD conference recently filled a large room to capacity, so it seems to be something that people find useful.

My second post on the StickyMinds Software Alchemy blog is Who fixes the bugs?, where I explore the question of whether testers should fix the bugs they find.

StickyMinds now has a blog area on their site, and they have invited me to contribute to their blogs. I get ideas about testing that I want to write about so often on my blog here, but I often don’t get around to writing about them. I’m hoping that having the expectation of contributing to the blog on StickyMinds will give me the motivation I need to get those ideas out. Some of them might even be good ideas. :-)

Take a look at my new Software Alchemy blog on StickyMinds, where the first post explains why my business card says I’m a Software Alchemist.

Of course, I’ll still be blogging here on my site too.

A thing my sister likes to do
Some evenings after supper
Is sit upstairs in her small room
And use her Thinker-Upper

She turns her Thinker-Upper on.
She lets it softly purr.
It thinks up friendly little things
With smiles and and fuzzy fur.

She sometimes does this by the hour.
Then when she’s tired of play,
She turns on her UN-Thinker
And un-thinks the things away.

It’s time to commemorate my eighth anniversary with Tejas Software Consulting, and sixteen years as a career software tester. My traditional Dr. Seuss quote this time comes from the story “The Glunk that got Thunk” that I had all but forgotten was one of the “other stories” in I Can Lick 30 Tigers Today! And Other Stories. I like the idea of being able to un-think some of our bright ideas that turn out to not be as bright as we had thought. The story continues with thinking a thought so big and so bad that it can’t be un-thunk, and I bet we’ve all seen a few of those.

One big project took a lot of my time during the past year, a fascinating skunkworks project that brought a new technology into an established organization. As I wound down my involvement in the project, it was being absorbed into the mainstream processes of the company.

I traveled to Toronto twice last year, including one trip during a snowstorm that left me stranded at the airport for two days. It seemed perfectly normal driving in the snow up there, unlike in Texas where even a rain shower makes me worry about who’s going to run into my car. I did a nice whirlwind tour to Boston and Philadelphia that included a leg on Amtrak that left me wishing I could take the train more often. Just last week I returned from the SQuAD conference in Denver, where I was honored to deliver a keynote address, only the second keynote I’ve been asked to do. While in Denver I was amused to discover that Casa Bonita isn’t only the subject of a Southpark episode, but is also a real restaurant. Much of my work was done remotely last year, making it difficult to maintain my elite status on American Airlines.

I enjoyed attending the Association for Software Testing’s CAST conference in Toronto and I’m making plans for the next one this summer, which would be another Colorado trip. The SQuAD conference is the third local conference I’ve been to during my career, primarily attracting participants within driving distance (the others were held by the Triangle Information Systems Quality Association in North Carolina and the Association for Software Engineering Excellence in North Texas). I’m impressed by the quality of these local conferences, and if you have one near you that fits well with the type of work you do, it’s worth taking the time to attend.

I’ve gotten regular positive feedback on testingfaqs.org, which I’m grateful for. I have a growing idea list for expanding the content on the site. Before getting distracted with new things, though, I have to catch up on the long backlog of newly submitted items that need to be posted to the site. I continue to apply very high standards to all of the site’s content, which makes it take longer to get things posted. Even when companies are offering money, I have rejected several ads that are too long (yes, you have to count the spaces too) or that don’t tell you what they’re selling.

My family life continued to revolve around my two daughters’ intensive participation on a competitive gymnastics team. Competitions brought me to many places in the DFW metroplex, plus South Padre Island, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, and Houston (for those who know what it means - they are USAG level 7 and 8). I got to meet Nastia Liukin a few days before her trip to the Olympics, learned a bit of Russian from Carly Patterson’s former coach, and met Nadia Comăneci when she hosted a meet at her gym. It was a special treat to host the National Danish Performance Team when they came through Fort Worth, and I really enjoyed having two of the team members stay at my house. SkÃ¥l!

I’ve had some big changes in my personal life recently. I’ve found that the fears that surround a decision about divorce can be worse than actually going through with it. Plus, I’ve had a big insight about how my own head is put together, which you can read about in Testers from Another Planet.

I have become a regular Facebook user, doing my business networking on LinkedIn and more personal interactions on Facebook. It’s been difficult deciding who to connect with on Facebook, since I see many of my business contacts there. I’m pickier about which invitations I accept on Facebook, because I do share personal information there. Facebook has been a nice medium for interacting with friends and family, including several of my former high school classmates that I hadn’t talked to in, well, let’s just say a number of years. :-)

Over on LinkedIn, the Convex Computer Corporation phenomenon lives on, with 353 members now in the Ex-Convex LinkedIn group that I manage - that’s more than 15% of everyone who ever worked for the company. Now 27 years since the founding of the company, and 13 years after its demise, many former coworkers are still in touch. At this point, I really can’t remember who I met when I actually worked there, and who I first met in the legends that they left behind and the reunions we’ve had since we left.

It’s time to get back to testingfaqs.org, and testing, and helping others test better. If I can help you in your work, no matter how large or small the request, please give me a holler.

In addition to the keynote “Tearing Down the Ivory Tower of Testing,” I will be teaching two half-day tutorials at the SQuAD 2009 Software Quality Conference in Denver -

• Performance Testing Fundamentals
• Testing Tools: Broaden Your Horizons

See the brochure at the link above for more information. The conference is March 11-12, 2009, and I hope to see you there.

I’m working on setting up a few networking gatherings in the evenings while I’m in Denver, one on March 10 for anyone who’d like to get in touch before the conference, and one on March 12 for contractors and consultants to share ideas. Let me know if you want details.

I’ve been putting significant effort working with my advertisers on testingfaqs.org, and it’s time to add an advertising category to my blog.

One bit of advice I give frequently, but usually without success, is for advertisers to change the text of their ads occasionally. When the same ad runs for several months, I think that it will become habituated with the regular readers of the site, and it will become part of the background. While it may be fine for new visitors who see it for the first time, advertisers also have an opportunity to pull in those repeat visitors to testingfaqs.org who weren’t pulled in on the first impression, simply by changing up what the ad says. I can rotate the position of the ads, which helps a bit, but people still will start to recognize the ad within just the first word or two, or even by the overall shape of the words, and then tune out.

Now I’ve had an advertiser take my advice and put in the effort to craft several versions of their ad to be rotated. Writing one good ad in 100 characters or less does take some effort, so I can appreciate the effort it takes to write several. Hopefully it will help them attract more customers.

If you don’t work in marketing, is any of this relevant? Sure, here’s one example. If you have a resume posted online, that’s an ad selling yourself. Refactoring your objective and other parts of the resume can help keep your resume out of the dreaded background noise when recruiters repeatedly scan the same list of resumes.

My interview about the “Testers from Another Planet” column is included in the January 2009 StickyMinds SoundByte podcast.

My StickyMinds column posted on January 26 is Testers from Another Planet.