This has been a hard week. My mom became critically ill and remains in ICU. This might seem a strange time to blog …

Scientist, author and husband of the Lord President of Gallifrey, Richard Dawkins, wrote about his Law of Conservation of Difficulty. The jist of it is that obscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity.

Quantum Electrodynamics, for example, is a genuinely difficult subject. Other, perhaps less challenging, disciplines - and let's n

Cem and I have announced that we are suspending activity on the Open Certification project to focus our efforts on the AST Black-Box Software Testing (BBST) courses and working to develop a skills-based certification based on that material. The original Open Certification project was focused on providing an open alternative to question-based certification exams, focusing [...]

I started a project on Google Code to create a set of Python tools to make dealing with Round Robin Databases (RRD) less painful.  Setting up RRD's can be tough if you don't know what you are doing.

anyone interested can check it out here:  rrdpy

I used it to create a simple HTTP monitoring script (included in source) to graph web response latency like this:

A checkstyle-like tool that detects the use of various kinds of constructs in Ada programs. Its first goal is to control proper usage of style or programming rules, but it can also be used as a powerful tool to search for use (or non-use) of various forms of programming styles or design patterns.

Posted by Lydia Ash - GTAC Conference Chair

Overview
The Test Automation Conference has been hosted by Google over the past several years bringing together a select set of industry practitioners as speakers and participants around the topic of software testing and automation. The annual conference provides a forum for presentations on important topics in our field connecting professions with others in their field through collaboration and targeted breakout sessions, but also has served the testing community by bringing the presentations public allowing anyone access to the information.

Several people have asked me recently why I’m not a fan of the traditional test automation tools for Agile projects. “Why should I use something like Fit or Fitnesse?” they ask. “We already have <insert Big Vendor Tool name here>. I don’t want to have to learn some other tool.”Usually the people [...]

Right now the top priority of the Watir project is to reintegrate with FireWatir and improve the compatability between the two implementations. I've begun serious discussions with Angrez Singh, the FireWatir lead, and we've agreed on this basic objective. There...