Author Archives: Robert Rose-Coutré

Visit the new book-review site

Visit the new book-review site

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The Doublecheckers

Exhausted after fifteen hours of preparing a CD product that had to ship that day, one last little error was found, and fixed. “It’s good to go!” said the person who fixed it. It was 11 p.m. on a Friday … Continue reading

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Archaeology of SDLC

There are some great names among the founders of the still-nascent field, industry, and profession of Software Testing & Quality Assurance: Dave Gelperin, Boris Beizer, Glenford Myers, Rick Craig, and Lee Copeland, to name a few. A name not often … Continue reading

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Big Data and the New CMO

Marketers and especially CMOs transition into increasingly technical roles as marketing becomes an increasingly metrics-driven activity. Big data is largely to blame. Metrics deliver actionable information on human community, phone apps behavior, ecommerce behavior, social networking, browsing patterns, as well … Continue reading

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Thanksgiving, Football, and Web Development

Thanksgiving reminds me of many things for which I am grateful. Thanksgiving is a time to count blessings, and a time to use football analogies for software projects. As the stuffing settles, and the games are on, my thoughts naturally … Continue reading

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QA vs. QC

Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Control (QC) have some overlap but for the most part they are very different. Here are some differences between QA and QC I can think of off the top of my head.

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Road Rallies & Software Testing

In the current phase of projects at work, a lot of people around me have been traveling, either from elsewhere to here, or from here to other places around the globe. Also a lot of others are taking summer vacation … Continue reading

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Binary Is Always and Never

“Binary Is Always and Never” — A better binaryesque statement would be “Binary is Always OR Never” but it would be less accurate. Many functions, thoughts, events, behaviors, appear stream-like, flowing, complicated, with millions of molecular, intellectual and motivational subtleties.

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Dreamweaver vs WordPress

I read web-tool-related forums and lately I’ve seen several “WordPress-or-Dreamweaver?” types of questions. WordPress is a GUI-like template-driven CMS. Dreamweaver is a hand-code-intensive Web Building tool. I wouldn’t compare them in the sense of “which is better.” I would contrast … Continue reading

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CSS Weblife

Remember when CSS was new and we all wanted to create lighter-than-air pure CSS websites? It seems like only yesterday. Browser quirks and complex flashy interfaces put an end to those dreams, at least in the realm of corporate and … Continue reading

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Adobe CQ5 (AEM)

Adobe’s CMS “CQ5” is growing in popularity among larger corporations because of Adobe’s extremely effective acquisition, bundling, and marketing strategy around the product. The definition of CMS has grown more complex and comprehensive because of CQ5.

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Word for the Occasion

Most everyone knows a malapropism when they see it, even if they don’t know it’s called a malapropism. Here are some malapropisms (followed by the correct form):

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Frankenstein and the Agile Casserole

What’s Agile? The word itself sounds upbeat, fast, and flexible. In fact, it sounds agile. No wonder almost every company and person in the known world today declares that it “Does Agile.” The concept has been accepted and embraced almost … Continue reading

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Cicero and Lorem Ipsum

Once upon a time in 45 BC, Cicero wrote “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” (The Extremes of Good and Evil), an essay on ethics. Among other topics, he talks about the virtues of seeking pleasure in the sense of long-term … Continue reading

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Wabi-Sabi

Wabi-sabi is a Japanese word that evokes a minimalist beauty that is imperfect, unique, understated, authentic, and deeply felt. Hyphenating wabi and sabi merges two slightly different ideas of beauty.

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Semantic Web

Semantic Web means XML-tagging content by type, uniformly, using the terms that people actually use to search for that content. One industry well suited to Semantic Web is pharmaceuticals.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Here are some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips that anyone can use to get started on improving your ranking in the search results of the major search engines.

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User Stories

Everyone likes a user story. People nowadays equate user stories with Agile or AMDD. But of course the same thing must be done in every software development project, whether waterfall, agile, or something else.

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Kanban

Kanban is a method in industry and software that uses cards or other signals to show when something is needed and what is needed. In industry, it refers to inventory and stock flow. So when you’re low on an item … Continue reading

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Use Case vs. Test Case (with a sidenote on Requirements Traceability)

A Use Case is not a substitute for a Test Case. I start with this point because there is a growing trend of organizations using Use Cases as Test Cases. Writing Use Cases takes a lot less time, requires fewer … Continue reading

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In-house Styleguides

The purpose of an in-house styleguide is to guide writers and editors in a particular company or office with its own style peculiarities. In-house styleguides might include industry usage that conflicts with standard publishing manuals.

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Pipelines and Smoketests

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. We smoketest a new build for a quickie reassurance that new fixes basically worked, and did not introduce new side-effect errors. Failing a smoketest tells us the code still has a fire to put out.

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Workmanship

When something works out well, as planned, no glitches, it’s nice to point it out because it seems to happen less and less often.

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Perils of a Living Language

Mankind is notorious for abusing other living things, for example, bird eggs with DDT, deforestation, gorillas in zoo cages, toxic waste, paving paradise, radiation, endangering the Quietschbükers, etc. But what about language? Language is a living thing.

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Type “P” Personality

Planning fills the air with joy and clarity. I’ve planned everything from building a bookshelf, to going to college, to setting up my curriculum, to researching a thesis, to having children, to buying a house, to re-roofing a house, to … Continue reading

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Shoulds and Shouldn’ts

Don’t you hate it when people say that you “should do this” and “shouldn’t do that”? I do, especially when they are saying it in a Requirements Document. “Should” can mean a lot of things, but it doesn’t mean “require.”

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Measuring the Window

I was having a window replaced at my house. But it wasn’t a normal window, it was a triple-layer fog-proof 20 ft. x 4 ft. window. Of course, my window space isn’t exactly 20 ft., it’s 19 ft., 53/64 inches. … Continue reading

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A Question of Context

There are several “schools of thought” in software testing. People who rigidly adhere to one school are very idealistic about a theory of software testing. Older and wiser testers mix and match schools, styles, systems, theories, practices, to fit each … Continue reading

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