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Archive for category Nerd T35t1ng

Testing questions and the Laws of eCommerce

Nov 30

Posted by Shmuel Gershon in Ask the Tester, Nerd T35t1ng, Test Insight | 4 Comments

(Disclosure: I am not a lawyer!) (Request: Are you a lawyer? Please send me corrections 🙂)

Matters related to law, and all the discussions around it, interest me much — especially when related to Software.
This made me read about the subject and keep contact with the legal representatives within the company I work for. This also motivated me to learn and lecture about the legal guidelines in software development adopted by our company, and to lecture about legal matters on software in general at the last Israeli SIGiST conference.
Most important than all, this made people share with me a lot of comments, questions and stories pertaining to the law.

For example, one colleague brought to my attention a case in which he and some friends had bought a PlayStation 3 in the local Office Depot website for 220NIS — when the normal price is almost tenfold! They believed it was some special sale promotion, but at the end Office Depot announced it as a typing mistake and cancelled the sale after it had been acknowledged (sale confirmation by email). 🙁
(There is an article about the episode in Hebrew here if you want to see it).

What is my opinion on the legal aspects of the story? I was asked.
I don’t have one, as I am not a legal professional, I answered. I am, though, a Testing professional, and here is the tester rambling I sent by mail commenting the occurrence:

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Job Description

Mar 12

Posted by Shmuel Gershon in Nerd T35t1ng, Personal, Test Insight | 1 Comment

I was reading a job position offering these days for a “QA engineer“.
There was the usual mumbo jumbo of the required traits (“BSC in computer science or equivalent“, “Worked directly with R&D department“) and advantage points (“General knowledge of at least one mainstream (programming) language“), and one of the requirements lines said “Testing methodologies: STD, STP“.
I got curious to know what these methodologies are and what the TLA mean, so I called the company offering the job: Read the rest of this entry »

On certified testers and being certifiable, and on non native english speakers :)

Feb 27

Posted by Shmuel Gershon in Nerd T35t1ng, Personal | 2 Comments

I like the SQE.
SQE brings columns by Michael Bolton almost monthly on the Better Magazine. They also arrange the nice STAR conferences (hadn’t the opportunity to participate yet, but I will eventually) and store a large number of articles online of all testing flavors.

Today morning I was greeted by an Email from SQE: The subject read “Are you certifiable?“.
My first reaction was to discuss the term. If I am certifiable? I? In my mind, I was arguing whether a person can be considered certifiable or maybe the topic of certification is the one certifiable.
As in “Software Testing is (or not) a certifiable topic” against “Johnny is a certifiable (or not) software tester”.

I was puzzled over the confusing choice of words:

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Testing Insights – The Graphing Calculator

Feb 13

Posted by Shmuel Gershon in Nerd T35t1ng, Test Annotations, Test Insight | 1 Comment

I’ve recently heard The Graphing Calculator Story, a ~54:00 min long Google Tech video on YouTube. On it, Ron Avitzur tells the story of the development of his (and Greg’s) Graphing Calculator, an impressive mathematical software that shipped with Mac computers for years.
What’s special about the story? Well, he did it at Apple, but for free (his contract was already closed), and in secret (Apple had cancelled the project). As he says, sneaking into the building and volunteering for an eight billion dollar corporation. 🙂

I enjoyed the story very much. It is very exciting to see the passion he had (has) for his software and how he was committed to it. Plus, Ron is a great story teller.
The graphing calculator had all the ingredients of a cool app. It scratched a developer’s personal itch, and is a great example of NeoVictorian computing: built for people, built by people, crafted in workshop, inspired.
Actually, if we’re commenting on NeoVictorianism, Ron was one that really “woke up one day to find himself living in the software factory“. The night got very cold, they said the factory is going to close and he should move somewhere else. The cool part? He kept doing his individual craftsmanship inside the corporation. Secretly.

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Stuart's introductions to Fitnesse, FitNesse Series (Part 2)

Nov 28

Posted by Shmuel Gershon in FitNesse, Nerd T35t1ng | No Comments

Hi.

Writing the Fitnesse posts turned to be harder than I thought.
I do have a bit of tests ready for the triangle case, but not enough text to make an interesting post. As I’m not using Fitnesse in my day-to-day work, it makes it harder to bring cool insights or to explore on the framework.

But I just discovered someone who not only uses Fitnesse at work, but also writes articles about Fitnesse that give the Fitnese feeling:

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Testers don't think like Developers think like Computers

Jun 16

Posted by Shmuel Gershon in Nerd T35t1ng, Test Annotations, Test Insight | 4 Comments

We all are told constantly not to think like a programmers.
We’ve told other people dozens of times “Don’t you think like a programmer. We don’t care why the software does it – it is still wrong”.

Dreaming in Code

For testers, thinking like developers is evil. If you think like a programmer, you’ll start excusing the software and will forgive the system’s bugs.

I am reading the very cool book “Dreaming in Code” by Scott Rosenberg, and I just understood a little bit more on why’s so bad sharing the developers mindset.

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Set the butterflies free – now I am collecting quotes

Jun 8

Posted by Shmuel Gershon in Nerd T35t1ng, Personal, Test Annotations | No Comments

I’ve started a quote collection. Many times I want to quote someone but I just don’t remember how exactly the phrase was. Or remember the quote but am not certain on the source…

I am fond of quoting.
Not sure why, but I like to quote. I guess it gives some legitimating to what I am saying. 🙂

So, the quote collection is available at this address: http://testing.gershon.info/quote-collection/. It will grow slowly, please check it regularly.