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

This week amidst all the crazy airline flight cancellations and my own pending flight to the Software Test & Performance Conference, I received an erroneous email from a large airline carrier.

I had already booked a flight with a major airline that was cancelling flights so I looked at flights from an alternate carrier and put a second flight on a 24 hour hold. I didn’t end up buying the ticket and the hold request expired as it should have. However the hold ticket generated an “easy online check-in email.” Mmm, feels like a missed regression test.

These thoughts and links are related but random – while I normally blog in more of a story format – these thoughts tie together only through the theme of data visualization.

Picked up on this blog re: data visualization. Nice list of tools used at different sites.
See: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_best_tools_for_visualization.php

Digg Labs’ stack tool is fun to watch. See http://labs.digg.com/stack/

Sometimes when I’m looking into ways to analyze data or I want to play with an analysis tool, chart or technique I need data.

Sometimes I don’t want to use data gathered through my work and sometimes I don’t want to deal with the time suck of scrubbing data.

Here are some sources I’ve found to pull data for exploration:

NationMaster
http://www.nationmaster.com/index.php
Keep drilling about the site and you can get to downloadable files to save data and explore.

I like maps. Last night I attended another event in a series of events known as the Festival of Maps here in Chicago. Dennis McClendon, a cartographer hosted a talk on field testing street maps.

In mapmaking, field testing means getting out and verifying maps against reality. Accuracy is essential. Dennis walks, bikes, and drives to check for accuracy. He’s measured buildings in downtown Chicago to get accurate readings. And he’s forged through some tough terrains to get information from back roads, waterways, railroads, and farm lands.

Sometime about a year ago I became interested in storytelling. I’m not sure how it started; perhaps I stumbled across a book. I know I started explicitly seeking books on the subject last summer and by the end of the summer my fledging theory was cementing that storytelling applied to business wasn’t crazy.

Can storytelling be applied to software testing? What elements of storytelling can I use? How can I weave elements of storytelling into the work that I do? Those have been guiding questions.

This morning I recorded a webcast with Scott Barber. The recording will be available soon through Tech Target. It was the third webcast I’ve recorded so I’ve been through the process before. Thought I share some thoughts on the experience. And I wanted to capture these thoughts before the day rolls on and I don’t have that still-feeling-it reaction.

The hardest part of recording is that we can’t see each other. The editor lives in one state, Scott lives in another and I live in a third state. We had a second editor on the line and she lives in yet a fourth state. So there’s no eye contact which makes coordinating a more thought involved process than normal. I wonder that people speculate that we’re in a recording studio together but we’re not. Two things about that are tough the dreaded dead air time or worse talking over some one. You do the best you can to rehearse and coordinate how to pass the speaking baton which leads to my concern about sounding canned and scripted. You have to plan the passing but then talk naturally when you’re up – however – you don’t want to stray so far from the slides or the material that your co-presenter is thinking - where is she now?

I write notes while I test software. I was concerned that writing this might not be interesting to other testers but when I think about people that might be new to testing, I thought write this, share it. Also I know I enjoy when other experienced testers write specifics about what they do, how they do things, and why. I was happy to see a recent post from Bret about his writing.

Thinking more about the topic, I've realized writing about notetaking is difficult for me. One reason is that my notetaking depends on the situation I'm in. But in an effort to avoid being elusive and to try to share with other testers, I thought I would try to share specifics on the recordings that I make while testing.