testingReflections.com - this.site

testingReflections recent outage

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 08:32:12 -0500

To all testingReflections loyal users, first let me say that I cannot apologise enough for the extended down time that you've experienced.

I cannot reveal all the details to this at this time but will do so in the near future. Suffice to say that the cause of the problems was due to a lack of available time to take the best care of testingReflections. The problem was exacerbated by a server move that happened before I'd had a chance to do what was necessary to make TR compatible with the new environment.

Over the last few days I've had to make time (at the expense of sleep or much rest over the bank holiday). The work is not yet complete but I am testing the next stage and will notify you of any further down-time well in advance (save any other unexpected events happening).

Thank you for your patience and I hope you continue to gain value from testingReflections.com

Best Regards

Antony Marcano

This message will be fixed here for the remainder of the week. Please scroll-down to view latest posts

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!!!!

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 05:45:37 -0600

This is a special thank you to everyone who has contributed to the testingReflections community... Thanks to all those visitors and thanks to all the content providers (who I hear receive plenty of good traffic in referrals from TR ;-)

January 2008 saw the largest number of unique visitors and page impressions for TR so far...

Unique visitors:        32,382 (19 robots)
Number of visits:       88,995*
Pages:                 264,866* 

*excluding robots

This has inspired me to spend more time working on TR (as some of you now affectionately call it)... this is going to take time and money... almost all my own at the moment...

If you would like to contribute, feel free to donate (see link in right column)... or if you are a corporation and want to expose your brand to all these TR users, get in touch via admin/at\testingReflections/dot\com.

Once again, many thanks...

-Antony

Why do I say "no thanks" to some blogs?

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 10:43:04 -0500

[textile]It has been brought to my attention that some people who have requested that their blog is aggregated on testingReflections and subsequently were declined feel somewhat rejected - or indeed bitter about this.

I expected this, however, it doesn't make me feel any less disappointed about it. It was inevitable that egos would be bruised the moment I had to start saying "no".

h2. Personal Feelings or Disservice to the Community?

WOPR9: Call for Proposals

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 23:50:27 -0500

Read more and register: http://www.performance-workshop.org/content/view/44/86/

Theme: Pushing the boundaries of performance testing tools
or when the performance test tool won't let you do…
Conference Location and Time

Microsoft, Redmond, WA USA
September 27 - 29, 2007

A Microsoft organized pre-WOPR event will take place on September 26. WOPR participants will also be invited to attend this event.

Welcome Seapine Software as testingReflections homepage sponsor

Sat, 02 Jun 2007 04:37:47 -0500

[textile]As I "previously mentioned":http://www.testingreflections.com/node/view/5493 the testingReflections homepage is welcoming a sponsor. Please welcome Seapine Software (see banner underneath the welcome message on the "testingReflections homepage":http://www.testingReflections.com).

Seapine want to promote QA Wizard Pro and, as one of their representatives put it, "we get to give back to the community by making sure sites like yours stay around".

Do check out their product.

Thank you to Seapine for their support.

If you are interested in sponsoring testingReflections, send an e-mail to admin|at|testingReflections|dot|com. We will discuss your budget and options for a bespoke sponsorship deal.

----
"sponsored links disclaimer":http://www.testingreflections.com/node/view/5492

Comments (temporarily) disabled for untrusted users

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 12:53:35 -0500

This is a precautionary step to prevent people from filling up the moderation queue.

Testing challenge @ pandora radio

Sat, 17 Feb 2007 21:10:42 -0600

I listen to Pandora (www.pandora.com) every now and then, and it is a great site. It offers a custom audio stream, based on your preferences. You choose an artist or song, and music by them and in a similar vein will be played. They have paid staff who do the classifications of all the tracks, and relevant classification from your choices guide the track selection. You can also fast track it by giving a thumbs up or down to a track. When you are listening to a track, you can view a selection of its classifications.

Goodbye Mercury.......... Hello HP

Sun, 17 Dec 2006 19:59:06 -0600

So what was Mercury Interactive that then became Mercury is now to be rebranded HP. Apparently, this is on the basis of the IT industry being more familiar with HP than Mercury. I guess that's true in general, but not in the testing tool space. Even IBM has preserved the Rational name, but Rational had ditched the SQA name when they bought TeamTest. So that great Mercury bull-grabbed-by-the-horns t-shirt from STARwest in October is the last one in a long line of Mercury images.... Guess I could save it for eBay, but it’s too good an image not to wear! (Mind you, I could probably put my old SQA TeamTest t-shirt up on ebay now!)

“Scalability” is a rather ambiguous term

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 19:01:48 -0600

“Scalability” is a rather ambiguous term, and there is a lot of confusion about it.

Let’s take a look at Wikipedia’s definition:
--------------------------------------------
“In telecommunications and software engineering, scalability is a desirable property of a system, a network or a process, which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged. For example, it can refer to the capability of a system to increase total throughput under an increased load when resources (typically hardware) are added.”

Blog Posting Disabled for New Users

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 04:32:27 -0500

[textile]I've been contemplating this step for some time and recent blog-spam attacks on the site have prompted me to do this sooner rather than later.

testingReflections has become the trusted source for high quality content, knowledge and ideas on software testing. Respected leaders in the field use the site regularly and comment on how valuable it is. I've been very careful to select content for aggregation so that it is useful to the community.

Conversely, anyone could register and start blogging on testingReflections (or TR as some people are now calling it) regardless of the quality of their content. This meant that the TR hosted content could be of significantly variable quality...

QA Friends - Online Community for Software Testing Professionals

Fri, 22 Sep 2006 02:51:14 -0500

Dear Software Testing & QA Professionals,

We, a group of software testing professionals started a site called www.qafriends.com an online community for software testing and QA professionals. The site is currently in pre-launch stage. A place where you can:

* Stay connected with old QA Friends.
* Find new QA Friends and expand your QA Network.
* Add and view list of your favorite qa friends and list of people who added you to their friends list(Admirers) along with thier online status.

Quantifying Risk

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 07:56:03 -0500

In the past in my current position we reported results in terms of failure rates. Our release critera was based on failure rates. Our ISO internal auditors loved this. However, these numbers were more than often misleading. They were not a true measure of the quality of the product under test. Some features with a small number of test but with 1 failure showed a failure rate of 10% where larger features with more failures showed a much lower acceptable failure rate. However the larger feature would be the one that we were concerned about but the numbers showed it was acceptable.

Learning how to estimate testing assignments

Fri, 14 Jul 2006 04:09:51 -0500

Last week was very important in my life span as a Software Tester. I realised that no matter how precise you are at estimating efforts and schedule - estimates are just that - Estimates - rough idea initially, but as you refine it - you get a more solid view of what is realistic estimate.

I Was surfing on QAForums -> Estimation & Planning section and read that estimation is all about experience. Tools and Templates help you to some extent - calibration needs to be done by you.

Serious Outage - apologies from the ISP

Thu, 22 Jun 2006 00:42:48 -0500

Yesterday, testingReflections' ISP had some serious issues at their data centre yesterday as part of an ongoing upgrade that went awry (I am sure there is a testing story in here somewhere).

Consequently, testingReflections had to be moved to a different server and there were some DNS propagation issues that needed to work themselves out before everything could run smoothly again.

They have apologised and all I can say is sorry to all of you who came to testingReflections and were greeted with nothing more than an error message.

Trackbacks temporarily disabled

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 17:26:19 -0500

[textile]Due to trackback spammers posting an unprecedented number of unwanted posts, I have had to disable trackbacks temporarily. I will enable it again once I get a chance to deal with the latest spate of spam!

This will take some time to resolve since they have posted a lot of unwanted comments that are not of interest to testingReflections readers... so, in the mean time - trackbacks are off!

It is a shame that these few spoil it for the many.