Rick Scott

Curated Articles Wrapup for July 2012

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 13:33:07 GMT

In the last couple of months I've started a new writing gig with SQE -- the folks who publish Better Software magazine, run StickyMinds.com and TechWell, and have published several of my articles before.

They're calling it a curation gig. We'll be serving up frequent short pieces linking to other interesting opinions or resources from anywhere on the web. So far, I'm really liking this format -- not only do we get to highlight some of the most helpful and insightful things that are out there, it also gives us the chance to expand on them, put them in context, or compare different approaches to tackling a difficult problem.

At any rate, I hope you find these pieces useful and worthwhile! Here's a recap of mine for July 2012.

Leaked Passwords and Better Security Practices (2 July 2012): Password security was in the news a great deal in June, with LinkedIn, eHarmony, and Last.fm all having their insecurely-stored password databases leaked onto the public internet. Here's a quick review of the very basics of secure password storage.
The Independent Double-check (19 July 2012): Nobody is perfect. In my former job as an artillery soldier, the way we dealt with this was making sure every crucial thing was independently checked by at least two people. As testers, we need to do the same thing, even when someone with more authority than us insists the code is correct.
Bug Chaining (31 July 2012): Bug chaining is an idea from the security world that hasn't gotten much traction in the wider QA/testing community yet. Assuming that all bugs are orthogonal to each other is a mistake -- sometimes two minors make a showstopper.

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Software Creation as Art

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 13:36:04 GMT

The predominant metaphor we use to describe software creation is an engineering or construction one -- writing a program is like building a bridge, or a house. I've long been unsatisfied by this view; to me, writing software has always seemed more similar to writing prose, or at least carving bespoke items out of wood. Chris McMahon, Marlena Compton, Zeger Van Hese, and many other folks have written up their own takes on what software creation has in common with art.

My latest article on StickyMinds wraps up the Philosophy & Testing series by exhorting individual testers to look to the arts, humanities, and social sciences and see what insights they can draw into their testing.

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Bare Minimum i18n

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 10:56:02 GMT

I think it's a common misconception that only applications that are targetted at an international audience have to deal with the topics we usually think of as internationalization, such as non-ASCII character sets, handling time zones and international addresses correctly, and so forth.

But in this day and age, you can get most of these "international" data variations even from dealing with a strictly domestic audience. Most common word processors emit non-ASCII characters like directional quotes, and users are increasingly aware of how to make use of characters with dïacritics, symbols like ©, and so forth. Besides, if you're working on a web app that'll be going on the public internet, trust me when I say that you'll get all kinds of different data thrown at it from all over the world, whether you like it or not.

StickyMinds just posted my take on the subject as this week's weekly column: Bare Minimum i18n.

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Is It Beautiful? Aesthetics in Software Testing

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 19:35:37 GMT

D'oh! I let this one languish for a while. My Stickyminds column on Aesthetics, the last branch of philosophy I'm exploring in the Philosophy & Testing series, went live back on 31 Oct.

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Logic and Software Testing

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 13:07:27 GMT

My latest StickyMinds column: Logic and Software testing.

As technologists, I think we often fail to consider that most everything we do has two sides to it: a technical side, and a human side. Similarly, the digital logic that underpins how computers work is first to mind when we mention logic in the context of software testing, but there's another equally important aspect of logic in software testing: using informal or persuasive logic to reason with other people. Dealing with zeroes and ones is part of our jobs, but so is arguing that a certain bug needs to be fixed, that one feature should have priority over over another, or that a proposed solution should be rejected as unsuitable.

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StickyMinds Column: Epistemology & Software Testing

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 13:19:11 GMT

I'm happy to note that my latest article has gone up on StickyMinds. This one's on Epistemology & Software Testing.

This one was actually a bit arduous to write, because it went off in a very different direction from where I initially thought it'd go. The pieces that do that can end up being the most illuminating ones, though.

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StickyMinds Column: Testing Metaphysics

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 19:00:29 GMT

Whoops! Forgot to make an entry here when this went up. I had the Stickyminds Weekly Column back on 30 May 2011 with the article Testing Metaphysics.

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StickyMinds Column: Ethics of Software Testing

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 12:28:28 GMT

I've got the front page of StickyMinds.com this week with a column on Ethics & Software Testing.

I would have loved to delve more into the foundations of ethical thinking and some of the ideas people have articulated about how to best "solve" ethical dilemmas, but the length and focus of the piece doesn't really permit. Maybe that's something for the future. =)

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StickyMinds Column: Philosophy and Software Testing

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 03:10:47 GMT

I neglected to post this at the time because I was enroute to Drupalcon Chicago 2011 when it went live, but -- I had the StickyMinds.com weekly column for 7 March 2011: Philosophy and Software Testing.

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