So I’m putting together my presentation for Philadelphia Test Bash and I’m running it with a theme that’s more or less “insecure software opens portals to the nether realms where betentacled eldritch nightmares await”. So naturally, I need to add tentacles to my slide deck. Creepy music, too, if I can find any that will Read More…
Category: Software Testing
That moment when
… you find yourself explaining the arcane business logic behind something that confused the living daylights out of you when you started working there. And realize that you’ve been there close to 4.5 years. And you actually understand most of what’s going on behind the scenes. This is particularly scary since most of what’s going Read More…
Learning a new art
I’m gradually getting a handle on writing non-fiction, by way of writing articles for the Ministry of Testing’s Dojo. This is a good thing, because I’m learning more about appropriate tone and not just rambling on screen as I tend to do with my blog posts. The count so far is three articles published this Read More…
More Software Shenanigans
This time from IIS, aka Microsoft’s web server, aka one of the many portals to the Elder Gods I’ve had to deal with. This time, we had the server deciding that it was going to completely ignore our carefully configured defaults and just drop a “sorry, no can do” on anyone who didn’t ask for Read More…
Lesson Learned
Today was going to be a semi-relaxing afternoon after a routine dentist visit. Ha. The minor, low-key release (yes, those are the danger words right there) proved to have problems that led to me firing up the work laptop as soon as I got home from the dentist so I could test the fix to Read More…
I Am A Happy Tester
Despite my clear inability to organize myself enough to do weekend posts, I sit here typing today a happy software tester. The reason for my happiness lies over at the Ministry of Testing’s Dojo, where they have announced the scheduled speakers for TestBash Philadelphia 2017. I’m one of them. This means I have a little Read More…
Things Customers Believe
It is truly remarkable what customers believe about software and software testing. Some of the ones that I’ve run into in the last week are doozies: If you get a popup that reeks malware it must be the fault of the software we just updated because it happened when the user was on that site. Read More…
Lessons Learned
Today’s workday went much as expected – crazy. It’s the heaviest day for our applications, which means a whole lot of people trying to get through the necessary reset of their credentials (necessary because changing user management system plus one-way encryption = you must reset your password) – based on login records in the older Read More…
The Day After The Day
You guessed it – more chaos today. I did manage to work out that one of the problems is that while our customers, the customer support people, and my team are all using the same words, we’re not using them to mean the same thing. This means we’re often needing several go-arounds to work out Read More…
Well. That was fun.
For meanings of fun that include spending the day in hyper-mode, trying to reproduce problems customers report, trying to find tactful ways to report back that a problem is user error, figuring out which problems are real bugs and which ones are user error, then trying to work out just how much hand-holding we want Read More…