Shmuel's Software Stuff

Things to share about Software Testing

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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Happy New Testing Year! Yet again!

Jan 5

Posted by Shmuel Gershon in Personal | 1 Comment

This is the third Happy New testing Year, after this one and this one. 🙂
This is quite exciting, three new years means two full years!

Let’s recapitulate my 2008 blogging activity:

Hope this next year comes with at least 12 posts, all of them useful.
Gotta start thinking on January’s post…

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

Nov 28

Posted by Shmuel Gershon in FitNesse, Nerd T35t1ng | Comments off

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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BotT: Linus' bug, youtube no workee!

Oct 9

Posted by Shmuel Gershon in Bug of this Time, Test Insight | 2 Comments

Hi everybody!

The last BotT (Bug of this time) was long ago, when we talked about testing and the Excel bug.
So now we’ve got a cool one, on which the most notable point is not the bug, is the submitter :).

Bug 439858 on Fedora (a Linux distribution) was (supposedly) submitted by Linus Torvalds himself. He started the Linux wave on August 91, and is still posting bugs on March 08 – you gotta admire him.
I am aware that the submitter signing “Linus Torvalds” may not be Linus. It actually doesn’t matter, let’s just pretend it is for sensationalism’s sake (regarding the admiration, you still gotta admire him even if the bug’s not his 😉).

Let’s try to analyze the bug report, and the bug itself, to see what we can learn:

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SIGiST Conference, my lecture on Fuzz and Fault Injection

Aug 30

Posted by Shmuel Gershon in Test Insight | 1 Comment

In this year I held a session on the “SIGiST Israel” conference.
It was a one hour lecture introducing advanced techniques, with examples of software testing through Fault Injection (with HEAT tools) and through Fuzz (variety of free tools). This month I received the average grade from the feedback sheets: 97/100!
Of course, I’m happy with the results. 🙂 Thanks to all who attended and asked questions.

It is possible that I’ll post here a transcript or some text about this lecture. One option may be to add my comments from the lecture as notes in the powerpoint slides and post the slides here. But I don’t like powerpoint much as it does a poor job of passing information (it takes the written word and limits it into bad format and structure).
Finding the time, I’ll write the lecture in extense text.

In order to keep this post still useful, here goes a short summary of the talk:

How to break software Read the rest of this entry »

5 things I learned at SIGiST Conference, day 1

Jun 24

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

Annotations from day 24/06/2008 of the Sigist conference on Software Testing.

Sigist Israel logoWhen not from a lecture focus, then from a side comment or explanation. Below you’ll find some insights I gained from today’s lecture. When not from a lecture focus, the ideas come from a side comment or explanation:

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