I recently had the honor of being interviewed by Michael Hunter, a Braidy Tester, for Dr. Dobbs Portal. Check it out: 5 Questions with Scott Barber.

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Scott Barber

President & Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.

Executive Director, Association for Software Testing

Co-Author, Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications

 

"If you can see it in your mind...

     you will find it in your life."

Software testing is improved by good bug reporting

I recently completed (successfully, I might add) the second of the Association for Software Testing's all online, free to members Black Box Software Testing course. Each of these courses is four weeks in length. I've been involved with this program since years before it became a program, and I am an instructor for the first course in the series, called Foundations. For this course, called Bug Advocacy, I was a student.

This post is largely copied from Cem Kaner's blog because I saw no need to re-write the same information :)

You’ve read about the Association for Software Testing’s free software testing courses. Now find out how you can get involved in teaching these for AST, for your company, or independently. This workshop will use presentations, lectures, and hands-on exercises to address the challenges of teaching online: Becky Fiedler, Scott Barber and I will host the Live! AST Instructors’ Orientation Course Jumpstart Tutorial On July 17, 2008, in conjunction with this year’s Conference of the AST (CAST).

Recently I succumbed to peer pressure and tried Twitter. Twitter is a "micro-blogging" site. It took me a while to figure out what that meant and what value it has, but after trying it, I get it now. It's a great way to share little bits of information worth sharing, but that doesn't (or often doesn't *yet*) justify a whole blog post. I find that I like it. It's a quick and easy way to keep folks up to date on what I'm doing and/or thinking about, like giving conference talks, or trying to flesh out some half-baked performance testing ideas.

The 3rd Annual Conference of the Association of Software Testing (CAST) 2008

Toronto, Ontario, Canada, July 14-16, 2008

Beyond the Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Software Testing

Keynote Presentations by Gerald M. Weinberg,

Cem Kaner, Robert Sabourin, and Brian Fisher

Tutorials by Gerald M. Weinberg, Scott Barber, Hung Nguyen, and Julian Harty

The Association for Software Testing is pleased to announce its third annual conference (CAST 2008), to be held July 14-16. The meeting will be held in Toronto, Canada, a city which features enormous diversity in culture, businesses, educational institutions, and the arts. Toronto is the perfect location for a conference on this year’s theme: "Beyond the Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Software Testing".

You can view the most recent brochure here, and you can see the conference program here.

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Scott Barber

President & Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.

Vice President & Executive Director, Association for Software Testing

www.perftestplus.com

www.associationforsoftwaretesting.org

"If you can see it in your mind...

     you will find it in your life."

December Issue of the Association for Software Testing Newsletter Now Available

I am proud to have my newest article published in the AST Newsletter, now titled Sapient Testing Magazine. You can download the December issue of Sapient Testing Magazine here.

This link packed post is based on a project failures blog post based on a list of IT failures (with even more links to more detail). It has some well known failures, some obscure ones, and some which don’t really qualify at all (exploding batteries?, Y2K ?). For some reason they chose to exclude failures that lead to human fatalities, so it is a very clean list (Ever hear of Therac 25?).

Brian Marick talks about the importance of examples in building software. Examples help people understand more clearly. If you are training/mentoring people on testing or software quality, this list has some great examples. For the classic “1 line code fix does not need testing”, look at the AT&T Network collapse. For the newer “component reuse leads to greater reliability”, look at Ariane 5 . The Mars lander is a classic example of integration bugs that even the most simple design review should have found. The LA Airport failure is a great example of how important risk planning is. The Airbus failure highlights the importance of configuration management. And the Russian missile defence snafu makes it clear why humans should be in control of computers and not the other way around. Let us give thanks that the world has some intelligent users like Lt Col Stanislav Petrov!