From a knowledge availability standpoint, being involved in testing in 2009 is probably much easier than 15 years ago. The community is not only larger but also, thanks to the Internet, able to share easily and broadly to a large audience. While there are some excellent commercial books on any testing topics (It is becoming a very large business …), and plenty of interesting blogs, there are also a number of very good free magazines out there which are worth our attention. I regularly read some of them and thought …

For a company such as Experian, providing best of breed information,analytical tools and marketing services there is a real opportunity to match quickly new market requirements. The world is transforming itself and whoever is able to rapidly adapt, will emerge at the top of the pack. We need to act fast, deliver these new products and ensure the same level of quality our customers expect from us.
As my growing organization is picking up additional product responsibility, I need to be a bit creative to manage 2 important challenges:

An increasing need …

Last night I was watching James Whittaker’s last year keynote he gave during GTAC 2008. James is highly respected in the software test community (he has just moved from Microsoft to Google)and I was interested to understand how he was seeing testing in the future. One important direction was around software visualization and how it could help testing teams do a better job and focus on the most important pieces of functionality or code. He made the parallel with Quality Assurance in the car industry where QA can actually visualize …

My current test organization has to deal with different development processes. This is what happen when you start building a software test organization on top of a company which has had a strong acquisition strategy for the past 10 years. It didn’t necessarily had to standardize the development process as the various products were not  integrated together. Things get a bit problematic when you actually want to take advantage of this integration to build better solution. When you deal with origination, customer management, fraud, collection, decisioning, score card analysis etc. …

Google has just announced the location for their next GTAC (Google Test Automation Conference). They will hold it in their offices in Zürich on October 21st and 22nd ! Looks like it will be all around “testing for the web”. Quite a popular topic these days. They will have a call for papers sometime in July ! More information on their blog
If you follow this blog, you know that I’m quite big on test conference. I’m actually writing this note while in Sofia. I’m attending another popular test conference: SEETEST …

I finally had a chance to finish reading Richard Branson’s biography: Losing my virginity. After Jack Welsh, Branson was on my top 10 business leaders list and after reading his 600+ pages bio, he’s probably not far from the top. What an amazing read ! To my surprise, it really reads as a novel and has a very particular personal touch I appreciate. The most surprising of all for me is the fact that Branson was not necessarily promised to such success: Poor academic records, dyslexia, not a lot family …

I’m a big fan of Joel Spolsky who runs an excellent blog on software development and management. He also run a very interesting collaborative website where you can get all your programming question answered by developers and testers across the world. I find stackoverflow.com very simple to use with a growing base of great people discussing software engineering and testing in a very effective way. Definitely a great place to hang around !
Here is an extract from the about page:
Stack Overflow is a programming Q & A site that’s free. …