Computer Programming Fundamentals

Today, I finished reading a rather old book. It was published in 1961. It’s about computer programming. So, what can you learn from a 50 year old book? While reading it, I got in touch with one of its authors, Jerry Weinberg. He seemed pretty astonished that even after 50 years someone was still reading one of his earlier works. Besides the fact that the book Computer Programming Fundamentals by Leeds and Weinberg was one of the first books to mention software testing at all, I got many more nuggets of wisdom out of it – astoundingly still valid, even half a century later. I decided to share my insights with others.

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First German Agile Testing and Exploratory Workshop

Last Saturday the first German Agile Testing and Exploratory workshop took place in Hamburg, Germany. As the content owner I asked every participant upfront in an e-mail to prepare a statement on the following three questions:

  • What is your position in regard to Agile Testing?
  • What is your position on Exploratory Testing?
  • What is happening in the field with regard to Agile and Exploratory Testing?

The participants for this first workshop were (in the picture from left to right)

Here are the insights from my notes and memories.

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Software Development Lessons from observing a movie team

A while back I was part of a team that made a small advertisement movie. We planned this back in June, and finally made the shots in early September on a single day. There were quite some lessons I learned from them, and how they worked. Even though I didn’t get to work with Steven Spielberg, I was still able to see parallels in the movie profession to my life as a software tester and software developer. Time to reflect on that.

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