On my last trip to the USA a month ago, I went to the Getty Center in Los Angeles and to Gap Corporate Headquarters in San Francisco, and saw great art at both. At the Getty, I had heard there was an Bernini exhibition, which I didn’t think would be that interesting not knowing much about Bernini. When I got to the Center, I realized there was some amazing sculpture in it. I joined a guided tour, all high tech with the tour leader having a microphone headset and the particpants all with headphone headsets. The tour was truly from the guide’s context: we started by entering a side door into the last room to see some masterworks, then jumped around from room to room but all linked with an fantastic narrative, The sculpture was truly amazing, not just for the detail in cloth, lace, hair and skin that looked like real people covered in marble dust, but also for the amazing “speaking likeness” as if they were just about to talk. A truly amazing cultural treasure, and returning soon to Italy. There are some pictures here and then this article has pictures with audio narrative from Getty staff (click the link).

I flew up to San Francisco for Agile Open California, hosted by Gap at San Bruno. While there was some interesting modern art including a life size giraffe (in a 3 story high atrium) that you could view from various angles as you climbed a staircase next to it, one attendee was an artist called Elizabeth McClellan who is a traditional artist, but who was using her skills in an fascinating way as a visual facilitator. Elizabeth created half a dozen visualizations of sessions and discussions capturing key ideas and images in what were truly modern works of art, but with a strong practical focus. On an IT project, I could see key planning meetings or other sessions being captured in this way, and the posters remaining as reminders of project culture that could be displayed both as art and project statements.

Oh, and there was some other very tasty LA art, a magnificent gigantic blended iced mocha I consumed for brunch while sitting al fresco opposite the Spanish styled clock tower in Westwood

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.

I’m enjoying being technoratified . I have more than 50 blogs as favorites. I noticed a note on one announcing a reissue of a project management book, with the opportunity to win a copy. The book is “Making things happen”, by Scott Berkun. You had to post on the qualities of a quality project manager. I was one of 50 posters while the competition ran, and was lucky enough to win one of the 10 books. I’ll reserve my opinion on the book till I read it, but it will have to be excellent to outdo Johanna Rothman’s Manage It which won a 2008 Jolt award. If you follow the link you'll find a podcast from Johanna to listen to, then search further and you'll also find a video interview as well.

The PM qualities list makes interesting reading, and there is even a synthesized audio track of the original blog post (but sadly not the comments). You can also read an Q&A interview with Scott on PM from the book’s original release.

Scott Barber has teamed up with Rosie Sherry of DrivenQA to bring PTSS Training to Brighton & Hove, UK.

Sign-up now for Performance Testing for Managers or Performance Testing for Software Systems; A Heuristic Approach.

December Issue of the Association for Software Testing Newsletter Now Available

Some time back, I blogged about a book I’d been significantly contributing to being available as a free .pdf download. (see the entry here)

Well, the book quietly appeared in “dead tree format” (as Stuart Moncrieff put it in his blog post about the book) a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been getting light heartedly scolded by some of my friends and readers for not making a big announcement, so here’s my “big announcement.”

Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications

by: J.D. Meier, Scott Barber, Carlos Farre, Prashant Bansode, and Dennis Rea is now available on Amazon.

Here’s a question that I didn’t realize I had much to say about until I read my own response.

 

The Question:

Software Development: Is it an art or a science? An age old question I know, but what do you think and why?

 

My Response:

 

I refer to new software development as a scientific art. I've seen some maintenance work, platform porting, etc. that has been almost entirely mechanical -- I'm not sure what that counts as, but I certainly didn't witness anything "artistic".