My obsession with monitoring amazon.com sales ranks is backing off a bit (I only check a few times a day now). Sales of the book are slow but steady, but given that it's a niche market, I can't complain. I don't make any money from the book, but I still want it to do well.
I was excited to see yesterday that hwtsam received it's second 5 star review on amazon. This one means a lot to me for two reasons. One is that it's from a non-MS person (not that MS people have to like the book, but industry validation is nice). The second is that the review nails the exact goal of the book - practical examples over theory. An excerpt follows:
This book isn't going to waste your time with superficial solutions, or perfect world scenarios, this book is written from the trenches. I spent the first day reading it, nodding my head, and at times yelling "yes, that's it EXACTLY". The writers are drawing from experience, they understand testing software, and more importantly, they understand how to position a tester, and a test team, for success.
I'm sure that at some point (maybe even today) someone will post the first one-star review on Amazon, but for now, I'm going to feel good about what we've accomplished for a few more minutes.
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Phil Kirkham (author of the wonderful Expected Results blog), responded to the request for photos of reader pictures with the following gems.
Thanks Phil!
Other readers ? keep ?em coming.
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Reader Ram asks:
?? should an SDET be an SME in the application or be an SME in automation only or should be an SME is both application under test and automation tool? ?
Full comment is here.
A tester can do many things, but very few can do everything. It?s ok to specialize either in the product, or an aspect of testing such as security or performance. When some colleagues and I created the Microsoft tester personas, one of the things we wanted to highlight was that an experienced testers role may be that of a subject matter expert, or in a variety of other roles. Jodi is a fantastic tester (and product SME), but Sanjay, Alecha and Kazutoshi are all fantastic testers too. It?s really up to the individual tester and the organization to allow testers to contribute their strengths to the entire testing effort.
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It's one thing seeing a copy of the book sitting on my desk, but it's very cool to see it in the local bookstores. Here's me at a local bookstore posing with 400 pages of words about testing.
I'd love to post pictures of some of the readers with the book. If you send a photo to alan@hwtsam.com I'll post it here!
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I think I forgot to mention that I'll be speaking at STAR this spring. You'd think I'd be pimping hwtsam, but instead I'm speaking about something barely mentioned in the book at all - metrics. Software metrics are an old passion of mine - something I used to be heavily involved with, but much less so in my current role.
That, of course, doesn't stop me from talking about how teams can use (or misuse!) metrics to make critical decisions. I think it will be a fun talk, and sometime between now and May, I'll figure out how to try and sell a few copies of the book too.
I'm betting that as the conference approaches that I'll have a few more metric related posts to share.
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Bugs in software are a lot like bugs in the home. Even though you know they're there, sometimes you just don't want to know. As a tester, of course, finding bugs is part of what we do. If I were to continue the analogy, I guess if an exterminator had an assistant who's job was to walk around a house and say "there are bugs right here - spray your chemicals here!", that's sort of what testers do.
It's a different perspective sometimes from the other side. If I pride myself on a clean house, I don't want to be told I have bugs - same thing if I've created something like a software program (or a book)...but inside, I somehow know that I really do want to know about the bugs.
The point that I'm happy to get to by only the third paragraph is that the other authors of hwtsam and I, have, for better or worse, started tracking a list of bugs in the book. We know of at least 3 already, and there are bound to be more. In another week or two, I think I'll publish the list somewhere on hwtsam.com. If you find a bug we don't know about, maybe we'll send you something (or maybe not, I'm still thinking about what would be appropriate - and affordable).
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I've never written fiction before, but if I did, I imagine I'd start at chapter one and work straight through to the end. Something interesting about hwtsam, is that it was written out of order. This practice is common in movies and television, and is done to make the best use of actors time and location changes - i.e. it's an optimization.
In the case of hwtsam, I suppose it was an optimization as well - but mostly an optimization of my brain as I always wrote whatever chapter I felt I could do the best job on at the current moment. The order was almost sequential, but not quite.
The first chapter I wrote - the first words I wrote while I was still in the "what did I get myself into" stage was chapter 4 (test design). I knew that Ken was going to write chapter 1 & 2, and at the time I had him penciled in for chapter 3 as well, so chapter 4 was going to be the first chapter with my name on it. At the time, I also had a hunch that Bj would write chapters 5 & 6, so my "second" chapter was chapter 7 (code complexity).
When I finished chapter 7, I wrote a few paragraphs of chapter 8 (Model-Based testing), but didn't like where it was heading, so Chapters 9 (Bug and test case management) and chapter 10 (Test Automation) followed. It was about this time that we figured out that Ken was going to write chapter 14. At the time, my schedule was a little hectic, so we tentatively planned on having Ken write chapter 13 (customer feedback systems) as well. Meanwhile, I wrote chapter 12 (Tools), then chapter 11 (non-functional testing).
Last May, in the week before and after Memorial day (US holiday), I took vacation time to stay with my parents for a few weeks. It was nice to spend some time with my parents, but the purpose of the visit was to get caught up on my missed deadlines. In that two week span I wrote chapters 13, 15, & 16. Over the summer, I wrote chapter 3 (engineering systems), and finally got to chapter 8 (the model-based testing chapter I had been putting off).
Chapter 8 was the most difficult chapter for me to write (I wrote 3 completely different versions before coming up with the final version), and also my favorite chapter from the book (I really don?t know why). meanwhile, Ken and Bj finished up their parts, and the rest, of course, is history.
I realize that this map of the book is confusing ? if you?d like to see how it ended up in order, this post has the full table of contents.
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