Matt Heusser’s Blog
Testing at the Edge of Chaos
Two Laws and a new article
I put this out in a private correspondence yesterday and thought it was worth repeating here:
Heusser’s first rule of ethics: When someone ends a proposal with the statement “… and it’s all legal!” they are saying that because it probably /should/ be illegal. Don’t work with them.
Heusser’s first law of guru-ness: To be a guru you don’t actually need to be smart, insightful, or even be able to write very well. All you need is to work in a field that has high turnover and a general inferiority complex, work on a sticky meme, be single, and willing to devote your nights and weekends to self-promotion.
Let add: This doesn’t mean that all people who talk about software testing or development are charlatans, crooks, liars, or not very bright. Far from it. I just mean to say that we can’t sit back and suck in ideas uncritically. We’ll have to actually examine the arguments about our field, hold them up to the light of day, challenge them and see if they stick. To put it differently: We have to test the ideas in software testing. I wouldn’t have it any other way; would you?
Hey, speaking of gurus, Informit.com continues to publish interviews I had with speakers at the Agile2009 conference. This next one is from Gerard Meszaros, author of “xUnit Test Patterns“. In it, I ask about developer-facing tests, how they relate to customer-facing tests, and the future of Agile-Testing. You can read the interview here.
My colleague, Markus Gaetner, continues to be of great help in creating and reviewing these documents. In this one, he contributed a large section of the introductory paragraph. Markus is a student of mine in the Miagi-Do School of Software Testing – which is not a paradigm but an actual School. I run Miagi-do free, non-profit and non-commerical. I have no statistics on how Miagi-Do increases job prospects or gives out raises. Instead, my students are actually /like/ to do testing and want to get better at it. More about that some other time.
Clearing the backlog
The good news is that Informit.com has just started publishing a backlog of articles from me, including “A Chat with Alistair Cockburn.”
Gosh that’s an old picture of me.
July STPMag is out -
The people at Software Test&Performance Magazine spent a considerable amount of time and effort re-designing the magazine – and it shows. The July issue is solid, and yes, our column still appears on page 10.
More than that, check out the new ST&P Website, with more to come in the months to come.
Seriously, please, check out the column and let us know what you’d like to see in future months.
May Issue of Software Test and Performance
Chris McMahon and I talk about Unit Testing Tools in our column in Software Test&Performance this month, on page nine. As always, it’s a free download.
My SW Craft Blog
I have a software craft blog that I am much less active with than Creative Chaos. I just put a post up on perfectionism and the worse-is-better approach. I think you might enjoy it, and I certainly hope it will surprise you.
April STP Magazine – And an article
For the April Issue of Software Test and Performance Magazine, Chris McMahon and I interview Paul Melson about security and penetration testing; the interview appears on page 9.
Of course, PDFS of STPMag are always free to download, and you can always apply for a free print subscription to the magazine.
Yay! March ST&P is online!
Well that didn’t take long. The March Issue of Software Test And Performance Magazine is available on-line for free. Download it here. Our column appears on page nine.
February ST&P is out!
Chris McMahon and I cover Service-Oriented Architectures in this issue of STPedia, which, yes, you can download for free. Our column appears on page 18.
January ST&Pedia in the mail (and, ah, intarwebs)
The January issue of Software Test&Performance Magazine is out. You can download it now; (for free) our column, which covers Application Lifecycle Management tools and Service-Oriented-Architectures, appears on page 28.
