Maaret Pyhäjärvi gave a talk, Exploratory Testing Reimagined , last week.  There's a  blog post  to go with it, so I won't say much on top ...

After reading a couple of my posts on AI that invoked comparisons with technologies in the rural environment ( Hedging Your Bets on AI ) and...

The latest episode of the Vernon Richard Show, New QA Job? How We'd Decide Where To Start , answers this question from a listener, Shady:...

I deliberately make tiny investments in learning opportunities for me and my colleagues.  Yesterday I was reviewing a PR which had a larg...

My friend Patrick Prill posted some of his System Seeing practices at the start of the year. He is a systems thinker and nobody's...

How do you test a product with distributed logic and non-deterministic components? Well, it depends on the product and when the questio...

In Looking Good, Testers!  I made the case that testing is about looking and that delegating the looking to someone or something  else invol...

Testing is inherently about looking because, put simply:  If you don't look, you're not likely to find. The interesting challenge i...

Over the years I've seen, heard, and been in many conversations about the tools testers must learn .  So many specific tools mentioned in ...

You've almost certainly heard of the Prisoner's Dilemma : two members of a crimimal gang are captured and interrogated separately. The polic...

Hands up if you think the world needs another format for retrospectives.  Yeah, right.  Yet here I am. Last October it was clear that we w...

My friend Patrick Prill continues to dissect the growth, use, and risks of AI in our industry at the rate of an article or two a day, each...

My friend and colleague Patrick Prill has been writing articles about AI in our industry at a prodigious rate over the last couple of weeks....

In 2024 I wrote a post, An AI Red Light , about a creative project I did with my daughter using both AI and "traditional" tooling. This was ...

There was a time when testing was all about the mnemonics . Well, we had no AI back then so thinking about our human craft and how to share ...

The Wikipedia page on infinite loops in programming describes them as "a sequence of instructions that, as written, will con...

I was guest speaker for a software testing class at EC Utbildning  a couple of weeks ago. I talked about one of my hobby horses — using ...

In Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work  Simon Willison writes: As software engineers we ... need to deliver code that works ...

In yesterday's Angry Weasel newsletter, Leadership is a Constant Experiment , Alan Page was explaining how, as a leader, he gets better resu...

Last night I was at the Cambridge Tester meetup for a workshop on leadership. It was a two-parter with Drew Pontikis facilitating con...

I bought a belt recently. Unexpectedly, it came with a tool for making holes and the notice above. My initial reaction was to ch...

It's all relative. There's enough wrong in the world that having an imperfect job in tough economic times is still a privilege that many w...

It's 14 years since I first posted on Hiccupps and one since I wrote about about  using trees for my mental health . Both practices are ongo...

Jerome Groopman, in How Doctors Think , reviews ways in which doctors can make poor choices, identifies potential causes, and su...

I'm slowly learning German ... for fun, believe it or not.  To limit my time commitment I've been mostly studying with lessons on a...

I'm enjoying The Vernon Richard Show  a lot recently because the vibe Vern and Richard have created is one where two knowledgeable...

Over on the Agile in the Ether  Slack instance one of the Ethernets recently asked: MoSCoW: Does anybody have a simple way of expl...

The theme at  LLEWT this year was Rules and constraints to ensure better quality.   My experience report concerned a team I'd been on...

It was my wedding anniversary recently. The picture at the top is the front of the card I got for my wife. Yeah, I know. Somehow she still l...

Maaret Pyhäjärvi  posted the quote above on LinkedIn a few weeks ago. It speaks strongly to me so I asked Maaret if she'd writ...

I attended LLEWT 2025 at the weekend. LLEWT is a peer conference  hosted by Chris Chant, Joep Schuurkes, and  Elizabeth Zagroba...

I'm been working on an application that will orchestrate data from multiple services. As the developers add clients for those services, th...

I've spoken to a couple of friends recently about testers they know who continually express a desire to "learn automation" and continually f...

We are generally not the target users of the software products we work on.  That's not to say we never use our applications or that we have ...

My friend Mirek wrote an interesting post recently: Where Rust fits for me . In it, he made a hierarchy of the programming languages he re...

The map is not the territory. You've heard this before and I've quoted it before . The longer quote (due to Alfred Korzybski) from...

In simpler times you had to go out of your way to find useless motivational banalities. There'd be an aisle in the shops that you could ea...

If you've met me anywhere outside of a wedding or funeral, a snowy day, or a muddy field in the last 20 years you'll have seen...

I told you how much I love Kill it with Fire by Marianne Bellotti in This is Fire and you can see it in my copy above too. It's a...

Kill it with Fire is ostensibly a book about legacy systems but is packed with good advice about managing any significant project. In one...

Kill it with Fire is by Marianne Bellotti is a truly awesome book about dealing with legacy systems. If you're in softw...

In a recent episode of the Vernon Richard show , testing's dynamic duo were inspired by Valentine's Day to talk about their love for our cra...

Whatever our workplace constraints, we have agency over our own actions and the choices we make impact us, those around us, and the wo...

Recently a few people have asked me how I test AI. I'm happy to share my experiences, but I frame the question more broadly, perhaps some...

My daughter's high school requires its students to have access to a laptop at home for school work. The school's trust is a Microsoft ...

Listen to Basmati on your streaming service

In What We Know We Don't Know , Hillel Wayne crisply summarises a handful of research findings about software development, describes how the...

Some friends of mine are talking about starting to blog. They know why they want to blog, they have topics to blog about, and they are thoug...

A couple of months ago, in Can You Hack It? , I wrote about how I increased the testability of a service by changing it in a way that allowe...

You Ain't Gonna Need It, YAGNI. A helpful tool to remind us to carefully consider building no more than we need to solve the problem in fron...