Information Technology Dark Side

I’m noodling teaching a 3 or 4 day rails workshop. Here are the topics I want to cover: Rails Basics REST Plugins/Gems (will_paginate) Deploying with Heroku Authentication Testing Localization/Globalization Mobile Print I think the course will be based on my demo app, daibatsu.heroku.com – over the course of 4 days we’ll build out the app [...]

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TroopTrack isn’t “hard-wired” to Boy Scouts. It has an admin interface that I can use to create a unit type (currently Cub Scout Packs and Boy Scout Troops), define achievements for each unit type (Pins, Badges, Belt Loops, Etc), roles, training, positions, etc. Over the past two years, I’ve had a number of ideas for [...]

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I’m Running Out Of Things To Hate If I were to give a name to the “theme” of the work I’ve been doing on TroopTrack for the past year or so, I would have to call it “Getting Rid of Things I Hate.” Here’s what I’ve been doing: Making controllers restful Making the user interface [...]

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Melissa Bugai (@melbugai) from Atomic object asked the question “What is a tester’s job?” in twitter today. After a few 140 character attempts at succinct answers I gave up and decided to write a blog post about it. A tester’s job is to make the product better I admit this is a simplistic claim, so [...]

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A True Story Years ago I lived in a small city called Nobeoka on the eastern side of the island of Kyushu in southern Japan. Nobeoka, as I remember it, is built on a coastal plain wedged between the Hyuga-Nada Sea on the east and steep mountains in every other direction. There was only one [...]

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Lately I’ve had a couple of people volunteer to help out with TroopTrack. These are usually scouters who are also programmers. One of them is also a designer with a lot of Rails experience – I find that really, really exciting because there are plenty of places in the TroopTrack UI that make me want [...]

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The Doit Step 1: Take a tour of the feature A tour is an exploratory testing exercise that helps you create a mental model you can use for planning your testing where you simply clicky around the feature and get a sense of what it does. A typical tour is aimed at answering questions like [...]

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Have I come full circle? It’s been almost two years since I started working on TroopTrack, and over a year since it launched. In that time a lot of things have changed – the partners I started with have quit, ending one decent friendship, and my attitude and objectives have changed dramatically. For the most [...]

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You don’t believe me Go ahead. Say it. WTH. Yeah, I know you probably said WTF, but I don’t use the F word. But if you want to, do it. I don’t care. This is crazy – how can slow growth be good? I don’t blame you When I started TroopTrack I thought I’d have [...]

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How I Find Problems in Software I use a mnemonic called HICCUPPS* to help me find problems with applications I test. The idea is that as I test I look for anything that is inconsistent with: History of the product Image of the product Comparable products Claims about the product User expectations other features within [...]

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