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Category Archives: Test Management

Meaningful Measures

Sunday, March 21, 2010

I arrived in Switzerland on Monday morning and met with our team here in Zurich who work on the communication server. Tuesday I presented a tutorial on advanced combinatorial testing and delivered a keynote address at Swiss Testing Days on Wednesday. Unfortunately, I really didn’t get to spend a lot of time exploring the city, [...]

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Assessing Tester Performance

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Originally Published Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Using context-free software product measures as personal performance indicators (KPI) is about as silly as pet rocks!
Periodically a discussion of assessing tester performance surfaces on various discussion groups. Some people offer advice such as counting bugs (or some derivation thereof), number of tests written in x amount of time, [...]

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Thoughts on Leadership

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Originally Published Friday, October 24, 2008
Last week I was at the Test2008 conference in India. The organizers from PureTesting planned a grand event with workshops in Hyderabad, Delhi, Bangalore, and Pune. Then the main conference was then held outside of New Delhi. When I arrived in Delhi at the conference I was told I would [...]

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Email – The Curse of Productivity

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Originally Published Thursday, May 01, 2008
It has been quite some time since I have posted. Part of that is due to personal distractions (getting my garden planted and my sailboat ready for the upcoming season), and part of that is being ‘in the zone’ working on some special projects at work. DeMarco and Lister [...]

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Peopleware: A Must Read for Everyone (Especially Managers)

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Originally Published Tuesday, October 24, 2006
I recently went to Portland, and when I am there I make it a point to always stop by Powells Book Store. They have a whole building about the size of a typical Barnes & Noble dedicated to technical books. It had been several years since I had read Peopleware: [...]

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Bug Counts as Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for Testers

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Originally Published Monday, June 26, 2006
Every once in awhile I meet testers who say their manager rates individual performance based on bug metrics. It is no secret that management is constantly looking at bug metrics. But, bug numbers are generally a poor indication of any direct meaningful measure, especially individual human performance. Yet, some managers [...]

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What’s Your Test Automation Strategy

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Originally posted Published Monday, May 08, 2006
I overheard some test managers discussing problems with their test automation effort, so I couldn’t refrain from asking the redundant question, “What is your test automation strategy?” They looked at me as if I had just beamed down from another planet and said, “c’mon, you know our strategy is [...]

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