As I was reading this excellent article from Matt Heusser, I couldn’t refrain from chuckling as I could relate a lot from what I was reading as an ex-software engineer, tester and now in a management position. As I’ve experienced most aspect of the spectrum, I can claim some objectivity and wanted to add my 2 cents to the article.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that I encourage software testers and managers to attend software test conferences and webinars as part of their training toolbox. I myself try to attend as much as I can, trying to synch them with a business trip (I’ve attended SEETEST and SOFTEC this year. I Will attend GTAC 2009 in Zurich in October. It should be a good one !!)
I’ve tried to find a place where all these conferences and webinars are referenced and I’ve found a good list …

So much to learn, so little time … Between magazines, conferences, books and actual experience, there is plenty out there to learn about software testing and become a better professional. A lot in Software Testing can be self-taught if you have the right mind and the envy. It all goes back to the lifestyle of mind so close to James Marcus Bach and his concept of a Buccaneer-Scholar (Personal note to James: I finally ordered your latest book ! Expect a review soon !).
If you have a busy life, and …

Interesting move last week from Apple ! They’ve made the source code of Grand Central Dispatch available under an Apache open source license. This is a new technology introduced in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard trying to help developers deal with growing multi-core requirement. In a nutshell, GCD is an abstraction of threads management which allows programmers to deal with them at a much higher-level. It introduce a pool mechanism and allow specific tasks that can be run in parallel to be queued for execution. A monitoring and scheduling …

You’ve just started your new job as a QA manager, QA Director, Senior VP of Software Testing etc. Your title doesn’t really matter as long as your responsibility implies some of amount of management and responsibility for one or multiple products. There is no secret recipes to become successful in your new job but the first 90 days are an incredible opportunity for you to set the tone for this next move in your career. This limited window of opportunity should be used to create sustainable advantage to pave a …

We’re currently designing and building a new product and there is quite a bit of work around design, usability, accessibility. A colleague just sent me the following picture (from stuffthathappens.com). It’s not only very close to reality but is a very good reminder to invest quite heavily on design. It’s good for your brand and your customers.

This article is not about the silver bullet around quality metrics you’ve been looking for ! Whether it exists or not is a vast debate. I’ve been writing about metrics in the past. Especially for important metrics to track when you’re software is out the door. I’m still scratching my head to find key relevant metrics to track during the course of a given project. I’ve been tracking a lot during the course of my career but they’ve never satisfied me fully.

For the past 3 years, I’ve been trying to build the best possible Software Testing organization For Experian Decision Analytics. During my vacation, I had a bit of time to reflect back on these 3 years and identify what building blocks were critical toward my initial goal. Trust me, it’s been a roller coaster ride but I’m feeling very proud of the team today and confident about the future. In this series of article, I’ll try to describe what I’ve done to build what I would consider a pretty damn …