I don’t know if it is, but I enjoyed Michael’s post on problematic uses of ’should’ in requirements.  Enjoy.

Another year rolls by, and James Bach’s latest post reminds me that bugs are all around (and can stay hidden for a really long time until somebody exercises the conditions to reveal them).

In that spirit, take the time to read about my favourite related bug story at snopes.com. From some relatively recent experience, I’m pretty sure similar bugs are still being creating around the world in new traffic systems.

I was interviewed a couple of weeks ago by Matt Heusser for a podcast on the website Software Test Professionals.  The podcast is now online at http://www.softwaretestpro.com/Item/4913/Twist-11—Twist-down-under!/

I’ve updated my ‘Essence of agile’ haiku page with a couple of new ones.  I think I’m counting one of them as post-agile.  I expect there will be more as I work through my own post-agile principles.

After moving my hosting, the basic content is back online, minus the last two posts.  Sorry for the interruption!

Things should resume soon.  I’m touring the Korean countryside and should be back at work mid-November.  Until then, expect this site to be quiet.  You can follow updates at http://www.twitter.com/xflibbleinkorea/, or http://www.quinert.com/korea/

I may be a bit slow, but when checking the links in my last post, I noticed that there have been updates to the Context-driven website. It’s worth a read – http://www.context-driven-testing.com.

You can see the old version at http://web.archive.org/web/20020727051040/http://www.context-driven-testing.com/

I hadn’t originally planned to go to the STANZ conference this year, but at the last minute they added two additional keynote speakers, James Bach and Julian Harty of Google, and it’s hard to pass up an opportunity to catch up with James when he’s in the country. Also, as someone aligned with the Context-driven school of thought, any STANZ with more than one context-driven presenter is a good year, so I’m looking forward to meeting Karen Johnson.

I’ve attended James’ Rapid Software Test class previously, and my understanding was that the “Exploratory Testing Explained” tutorial is a one-day version of his RST course, so I asked what value I might get from doing the course again. James offered three reasons, but my notes appear to have gone missing and I can only remember enough to paraphrase two –

- The course materials change over time, so there may be new things if it’s been a while since you took the course.
- You may benefit from going through things again, to refresh or pick up new nuances.

A third, which James may not have mentioned, is that sometimes he gets those that have done exercises before to help out with their running, so that may be an added bonus if tester training is something you like to do.

One of the other reasons I’m attending STANZ this year is to network. In a tough employment market (I’m paying my own way to STANZ – ouch), extending my network is important, as is learning which companies still have budget enough to send their testers to conferences!

It looks like a good mix of presenters this year, although I was disappointed to see Karen Johnson’s test strategy workshop is Wellington-only. As per my recent post, I think this is an important area that’s underdone. Some of the feedback from the workshop I ran with Paul Szymkowiak at last year’s STANZ also suggested that this is an area of interest for many of us.

If you’re attending, and you’re reading this, make sure you go out of your way to track me down.

After taking the easy route and building some XML check test scripts using Ruby and REXML’s DOM access, I decided that I really didn’t want my computer grinding to a halt for a whole day while it parsed a gig and a half of XML. So it was time to try a streaming parser. Unfortunately, the REXML website seemed to be unavailable. Which led me to this very nice tutorial on Jan Vereecken’s blog:

http://www.janvereecken.com/2007/4/11/event-driven-xml-parser-in-ruby

I’m pretty sure it’s nicer than the one on the REXML site, but I will have to wait and see.

Anyway, thanks Jan!