Beginning at the Beginning

Or, who's this guy and what does he know about testing anyway?

Well, for my personal info you can read the sidebar, of course, but just briefly, my name is Steve Sandvik. I turned 36 in May, and got out of the power industry and got a paid job testing in June, which was a pretty decent late birthday present.

Grr, this is supposed to be an intro post, not a bug report. So far I've found 3 bugs associated with lists in blogger, when I wasn't even trying:

1. You can push both the bullet list and numbered list buttons. After that it's just not right.
   
2. Highlighting text that is half in and half out of a list and deleting it from the keyboard (but not with the context menu "delete") reverses the sense of the list button that matches the type of list the text was deleted from. Both 1 and 2 can place you in situations where both buttons are highlighted, which has no obvious correct interpretation.
3. In a list, turn list mode off and back on. The last item will sometimes be one line lower than it was.

So what do I do? Start characterizing the bugs. Go figure. And looky here, there's nothing resembling a "report bug" button, I'm supposed to go post in the morass that is Groups. *sigh*. I love Google, I'm a GMail and GReader addict, but I wish they wouldn't use Groups as their bug reporting tool. Plus, of course, *finding* bugs is fun. Writing good bug reports is a lot more like work.

I was lucky enough to get a chance to personally thank James Bach and Cem Kaner at CAST 2007 for their online testing education resources. I found them to be a huge help in learning the language of software testing, and in being able to explain how 13 years of mechanical, electrical, and electronics troubleshooting and operations would make me a good tester, as well as in teaching me a raft of techniques and heuristics.

So anyway, here's my blog. It's another testing blog. There's lots of them out there already. My goal is to discuss interesting things about testing, and hopefully as a result make myself and others better at testing. Time will tell if it works.

(Things this won't be about, except insofar as I can relate them to testing, even though I have strong opinions about all of them: politics, sports, music, parenthood, the military, commercial power generation, the environment, unions, economics, my OS can beat up your OS, and personal finance. I'm no more an expert on 9/11 than Rosie O'Donnell is...well, maybe more than she, but still I'm no expert on most of the things I listed above; anyway, this is a testing blog, and I hate it when blogs I read for a specific topic throw in the random Bush-bash, or whatever their particular leanings dictate, so I'm not going to do it. I hope.)