Recently in testing Category

Most of the people that know me, know by now that I left IBM back in September and went to a startup named tinyprints.  They do wedding invitations, birth announcements, holiday cards, etc...  I took a week off between jobs and headed over to the Eastern Sierras and Boundary Peak with Timber and Wookie to do some camping and hiking.  It was a fun trip, and when I started at tinyprints I immediately jumped into the deep end.  I was brought in to lead the test team, and we had a lot of testing to do before we launched lots of new features and functionality on October 1st.  So I worked day and night every day for my first 2 weeks until we did the launch.  It was kind of like the movie Gladiator where Maximus first goes to Rome and gets thrown into a battle where his team is supposed to get slaughtered.  It starts out being chaotic, but he gets his cohorts organized and actually wins the battle.

But now that I've been here a little while longer things are going more smoothly.  It is quite a bit smaller than IBM, and the culture is different, but I think the adjustment is going well and I'm enjoying my work.  And it is nice to work on something that lots of people will actually see and use.  So if you are having a baby or getting married or having any kind of occasion you really should check out tinyprints and weddingpaperdivas.  And if you email me I can send you a coupon code to save 20 %.

Woohoo!  Our product actually got launched!  My last product at IBM (more on that later) was the IBM eDiscovery Analyzer.  It is basically a search engine that allows companies to search through email and it is targeted at the legal search and discovery market.  A typical business case is say you are a large company that is getting sued for patent infringement.  Typically what you would do is sequester the email of all the people that worked in that area.  Then you will send the email to a company that specializes in looking through the emails for the actual emails that are relevant to the case.  But the companies that specialize in looking through the emails do it manually and they charge a lot of money.  So in comes IBM eDiscovery Analyzer.  It can crawl your emails, run analytics against it, and allow you to search through the email by keyword, subject, date range, To, From, CC/BCC, top senders, top recipients, top phrases, etc... so that you can slice and dice the data any way you want in order to find the emails that are relevant to the case.  Here are a few articles about it:

1. IBM Expands eDiscovery Portfolio with eDiscovery Analyzer
2. Our Announcement
3. Rueters Article

My 90 minute talk yesterday went pretty well.  I did run into one snag though.  I showed up to the room 30 minutes before my talk was scheduled to begin, and I spent 29.5 minutes wrestling with 2 different projectors to get my slides to display.  Luckily I was finally able to get it to work in time and I started on time and ended about 6 minutes early.  I talked about philosophy, what works for my team, did 2 demonstrations, showed source code, and showed some the artifacts of the test automation that my team does.  I'll have to find out if the slides can be made public.  I'm fairly certain that the source code and demonstration movies cannot be made public.  But if you are an IBMer I can share it all with you.  :-)  So overall I feel like it was worth the time and effort to give the talk because I think my team's work will help other groups to become more effective in how they test software.

Tomorrow is the testing conference that I have been preparing for.  I'm finishing up the last touches on my slides, and also getting the demo stuff ready.  I've decided to make videos of the test automation running instead of doing a live demo because I know from experience that something will break that will cause at best a delay or at worst the demo to not get done at all.  So after my slides and videos are done all I need to do is check out the room where I'll be doing the presentation to do a quick run through, make several backup copies of the slides in different formats, and then practice some more.  I feel like I am preparing to do a one man show on broadway.  :-)

A while back I submitted two abstracts to a testing conference, one about Test Automation and another about Continuous Integration.  I got word back that the abstract for Continuous Integration was accepted while the one about Test Automation was not.  Right on...  So late last week I got a copy of the agenda along with a request that I send in my bio and slides for my 90 minute presentation by this coming Friday.  So I started working on my slides for Continuous Integration and was almost done with them when I looked at the Agenda.  When I did, I saw that I was scheduled to speak about Test Automation.  I thought that was weird, so I emailed the coordinators and sure enough they made a mistake and I really am going to present my work on Test Automation.  Doh!  So I get to shelve my slides on Continuous Integration and get something whipped together to turn in by tomorrow.  So I guess I should stop blogging and finish up my slides.  :-)  I'm not sure if I'll be allowed to make them public or not, I'm guessing I will.  So if I am able to make them public and if my presentation is video taped I'll try to post them.