Testy Testy: Recent Comments

Comment on Software Updates=Bad User Experience

Thought — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:01:02 GMT

Oh, and Outlook has so many sieze-up and response problems, pretty much all of which can be traced directly back to not separating the UI from the data.

Comment on Software Updates=Bad User Experience

Thought — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 18:56:51 GMT

All of these problems can be summed up by two issues:

1) Only UI / Usability programmers should have anything to do with interfaces. Only one UI / Usability team should have control of the whole interface; everyone else should keep their grubby mitts off - and this should be enforced. It shouldn't be possible for any code other than an approved UI to do anything directly UI related; you're either UI or data, never both.

2) Updating code and data should be built into the lowest level of the OS. The OS sould be tracking the update source for each insalled piece, monitoring the traffic level on the network bottleneck point between the machine and each source where possible, and polling and updating its cached code and data in bits in the background when there's more than say 20% processor and traffic space free.

Comment on Greetings from my Cyborgtoe

Inder P Singh — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 21:24:09 GMT

Hope you get well soon and your health problem soon go away!

Comment on Testing for the User Experience-First Scientific Paper

Inder P Singh — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 06:08:26 GMT

Thanks for explaining Workflow testing! I especially liked your tips regarding the composition of a successful workflow team and the list of tasks in a workflow testing exercise.

Inder P Singh

Comment on Creative Suite 4 Unofficial Highlights

Ellen M. — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 08:51:27 GMT

We sadly won't be upgrading any time soon due to the current state of economic freefall, so I won't let you taunt me with the promise of well behaved vectors. I should actually install the demo on my Mac at home, poor thing hardly gets used for design work now that my job saddled me with a giant laptop to cart to and fro.

Comment on Hello from PNSQC

Testy Redhead — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 20:09:16 GMT

Hi Ryan,

That is so very cool! I hope it goes well. Let me know if I can help out and how it goes in general.

If you are able to get a workflow exercise going, I'd be glad to participate if we can work out a non-disclosure/non-compete situation (of course depending on the team, but since I'm working on Suites it's not likely we are in direct competition). I'd be more than glad to go over any ideas with you that you might have for customizing your scorecard to make it apply to the workflows that you are trying to represent! Best of luck.

I've talked to 2 other people who had their first workflows with good results! I'm excited to see how the idea morphs as people adapt it to better suit their context. It was a wonderful conference and I'm already working on a paper for PNSQC 2009 where I hope to make us some nice signs.

Best of luck!

Lanette

Comment on Hello from PNSQC

Ryan Psenski — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 20:02:45 GMT

Lanette,
Your presentation was my favorite from the PNSQC. Congratulations on the well-deserved honor of best paper. I'll be doing a 5 minute "teaser" about workflow testing at a test team meeting this Thursday. If my peers take an interest, I'll delve deeper into the topic at a dedicated meeting (where I'll pretty much regurgitate as much as I can remember from your presentation). Keep up the great work!
-Ryan, Microsoft

Comment on Greetings from my Cyborgtoe

Thought — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 09:20:07 GMT

I've found www.writingexcuses.com a marvelous podcast on writing (novels, web comics, etc) from inside the minds of professionals (it's their primary source of income). "15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry, and we're not that smart!" (:

Comment on Reducing Test Case Bloat

Lanette — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 14:55:26 GMT

Hi Harry,

I'm just getting back in to learning more about UML. Any good tutorials or classes you'd recommend for becoming more comfortable with UML itself?

Thank you for these links. I've been enjoying them today!

Comment on The Paperless Office

Chris — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:05:00 GMT

It's been several years now that I've had source to final media automated.

You won't find off the shelf tools for this, so one way or another you are in for custom programming of some kind to extend the tool. I've used Visual Build and Microsoft Team Foundation Server as the base build platforms.

The installer technology is another issue that can be a stumbling block. We use WIX which is working well for us. It is poorly documented, so there were some long days searching the web and experimenting to figure it out.

Our current media is a .msi release to the web, so final media is easy. If you have to produce a CD/DVD you might need to find an ISO creation app that fits into your workflow. That isn't too hard though.