I have a colleague whom I used to view as a loudmouth. He was intelligent, articulate and full of life, but also highly arrogant and opinionated. And he always shouted, hurtling his voice across the room. One evening.....

It may seem like a contradiction, but you can view yourself as a team player and still impede your team’s ability to succeed.

There’s a hotel near my office that's a popular site for business meetings and conferences. It’s part of a hotel chain that prides itself on its service, and it shows. I’ve given numerous presentations at this hotel chain, and I’ve been impressed with the staff’s attentiveness and responsiveness. But the last time I visited the hotel for a dinner meeting, something was different.

By Fred Davidson (Originally posted September 17, 2009)

I worked with a developer once who was troubleshooting a defect I found, and after trying to duplicate it his response was, "It works fine on my machine." He was technically correct (it did work fine on his machine), and he wasn’t trying to avoid solving the problem, he was merely commenting that the code was functioning properly on his system. After working on it for some time, we found that at one point in the past he had an older version of the software on his machine which included a library file that was missing from the new version. Hence, when he ran the program it functioned properly, yet on a new install it would fail.

A computer is really, really good at identifying the differences between two chunks of text.  Use the Gold Master pattern in circumstances where you need to verify that there are no unexpected changes.

It happens repeatedly: People assure customers that they can ask questions at any time, but their actions suggest otherwise. For example....

The video of my keynote is up on StickyMinds: "Large-scale Exploratory Testing: Let's Take a Tour."

A lot of Twittering occurred (I am told, I do not tweet and try to avoid twits at all costs) about the "god comment" I made during my keynote. Lest you fear for my immortal soul, allow me to give the quote in full context.

No, you won’t need an oracle or a tricked-out DeLorean to peer into the future. It turns out you’re already using a great tool for simulating time travel.

By Risa Cohen (Originally posted September 04, 2009)

The quality of a product relies heavily on the quality of its ingredients. Ignoring one particular ingredient when creating automated test scripts can leave you with a set of “half-baked” scripts that require constant maintenance--some scripts run once successfully but fail after that, while others may contain the same sequence of steps that all need to be modified if a change needs to be made. A little RUMM at the start of the script development process will save you a lot of time and frustration in the future.

RUMM stands for:

• Reusable
• Understandable
• Maintainable
• Modular

Google this week unveiled Google Dashboard, which brings all of the information that we knew Google was collecting about us into one convenient, tidy browser window. All those accounts--Gmail, Blogger, Google Docs, Picasa, Feedburner, etc.--and snippets about their most recent activity now can be accessed from a central location.

And, of course, the reactions have been mixed. For some, the ability to see and edit all these accounts (e.g., to delete search histories) is a matter of convenience. For others, seeing all that information in one place is a bit of a privacy nightmare and makes Google look even more like the "Big Brother" some critics have made it out to be in the past.