Cloud Computing - Getting Started

Regardless of your role in your development process, you may well be doing cloud compuing in the next few years. If you are using Microsoft's Azure for cloud computing, here is a good starting point.

http://windowsazurebootcamp.com/

QA Achievement Levels

In my previous post, I pondered whether measuring skill through pre-defined Achievement Levels was a good idea or not. After deciding to have some fun with this. Here is my list of QA Achievement Levels that could be used on your team.

What would you add to the list?

Holistic Detective - You identify a test case that identifies in a major defect which requires no less than 80% of all current functionality to reproduce.
Sisiphus - You have run through the same test cases for the last ten releases with no new defects found.
Epic - the test cases you identified for a feature have an execution time measured in person-years.
Nailed It - A feature you tested has been in production for at least a year with no defects reported by the users.
Guru - You submitted a defect that was fixed and verified without the need for any clarification by the developer.
Borg - More than half the defects you report are as a result of automated tests you have written or automated testing tools you have used.
Cassandra - You have correctly identified the modules that will cause the biggest support headaches when released and nobody believed you.
Dead Parrot - You have an extremely difficult time convincing the developer that their ‘fix’ does not, in fact, fix the issue. After several hours of showing all the ways that the issue still exists, you are offered a slug.
Jar Jar - Every bug you submit requires clarification. For this, you are made team lead.

Measuring Skill

While the following list of 'achievements' is funny, is this approach helpful?

http://blog.whiletrue.com/2011/01/what-if-visual-studio-had-achievements/

Can our skills be measured in such a cut-and-dry way?

You could think about it, or just have fun with the list.

Is it me, or am I getting old?

For kicks, I looked up the first set of web pages that I created, and archive.org had them.

http://web.archive.org/web/19961110051852/www.math.unt.edu/

This snapshot is from 1996, though the original pages were 1994 or 1995.

A couple notes about these pages.

- The buttons were all manually-created (with some long-forgotten editor, possibly a early version of Photoshop)

- The logo image was from some mac-based program (again, I forget the name of it)

- All the html code was hand-generated. If you look at the faculty page, you'll see the dl, dt, dd html tags, which are rarely (if ever) used. (these were intended for lists of words and their definitions)

I don't often need to use this knowledge to create new content, but it does help me understand why a page acts like it does when I'm testing.

The Happiness Metric

There are lots of studies (cited in the links below) that show that happy team members make projects successful. Jeff Sutherland talks about the 'Happiness Index' and how it is used to make sure the project is on track.

http://scrum.jeffsutherland.com/2010/11/happiness-metric-wave-of-future.html

http://scrum.jeffsutherland.com/2010/12/scrum-inc-sprint-2-retrospective.html