One good reason for reading Michael Hunter’s blog: He’ll help make sure you don’t miss thing like this (http://www.ayeconference.com/Articles/TestTrimmingFable.html)–a new fairy tale from Jerry Weinberg. Kids (and their grandfathers) say the darndest things.
Past Presentations
You can find an extensive list of presentations and courses that I've taught, including the slides and speaker notes for many of them, here.
Coming up—let's meet!
Highlights from my schedule appear below. If you notice that I'm in your part of the world, drop me a line if you'd like to get together. If you'd like to engage my services and worry that I'm not available, please note that my clients' schedules are subject to change, so mine is too. Please drop me a line in any case.
May 21-23, 2012
Utrecht, The Netherlands
A public session of the Rapid Software Testing class in the Netherlands, presented through Immune-IT. Register here.
May 24-25, 2012
Utrecht, The Netherlands
A public class of Rapid Software Testing for Managers, also presented through Immune-IT. Register here.
June 12-14, 2012
Cary, NC
Private training and consulting in Rapid Software Testing for a corporate client.
June 25-29, 2012
Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Private training and consulting in Rapid Software Testing for a corporate client.
July 10-12, 2012
Cary, NC
Private training and consulting in Rapid Software Testing for a corporate client.
July 16-18, 2012
San José, California, USA
Presenting "Critical Thinking for Testers" at the CAST 2012 conference.
August 21-30, 2012
Beijing, China
Training and consulting in exploratory testing for a corporate client.
September 10-12, 2012
London, UK
A public class of Rapid Software Testing, organized by ElectroMind.
September 24-28, 2012
Copenhagen, Denmark
A public class of Rapid Software Testing, organized by PrettyGoodTesting.
September 24-28, 2012
Copenhagen, Denmark
A public class of Rapid Software Testing, organized by PrettyGoodTesting.
October 1-4, 2012
Anaheim, California
The STAR West Testing conference.
October 9-11, 2012
Toronto, Ontario
A public offering of Rapid Software Testing, organized by the Toronto Association of System and Software Quality.
November 5-8, 2012
Amsterdam, Netherlands
A tutorial and track session at EuroSTAR 2012.
December 3-7, 2012
Oslo, Norway
A public offering of Rapid Software Testing.
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Bolton or Hunter, it’s always great information for testers like me.
Jerry’s tale is fabulous and so much to learn from it for all of us.
The story is real nice. And it does make perfect sense. But as a manager, I still run into scenarios where my testers say there isn’t enough time to finish the test cycle, even after we have used up the buffer we had in place to account for delays. I doubt if any of my customers will be nice enough to sit down a listen to an interesting story! Any comments on what other managers do in these scenarios?
I’m not sure exactly what your testers are telling you. They may mean that they don’t have enough time to accomplish all the tasks that you asked them to perform. They may mean that they still have interesting questions that they could ask about the product that they haven’t yet been able to answer. They may mean that there have been problems that blocked progress at some point. They may be testing to standards that are higher than necessary to serve the project.
No matter what your testers are telling you, if you’re a manager, it’s up to you to manage your project. It’s not up to your testers; it’s up to you. Your options–in collaboration with your client, who really gets to make the decision–include a) deeming that the uncertainty is acceptable; b) deeming that the uncertainty is unacceptable, and adding more time to get answers to the as-yet unanswered questions.
Is the part about using up the schedule time and the buffer a surprise to you? Is it a surprise to the client? If so, why?
There appears to be a nasty bug in Blogger which allows someone to leave a post and allows me to provide a response, but which never updates the blog to reflect the comment. I don’t know why this is so, but it’s responsible for at least one other comment disappearing. I’ll try to investigate…
“Never” is a mighty long time. The comments seem to appear eventually. I believe I lost at least one comment at some point, but the ones above finally appeared.