Ten Year Plaque!

Like most major milestones of my life, it's a time of reflection.

I was hired by StatSoft in April, 2006. I was so nervous for the interview and so thrilled to get the call late on a Friday afternoon that I had been offered a position.  Statistics + software + getting paid = My dream job.  It has been challenging, fun, and almost never boring.

Dell acquired StatSoft in 2014, and happily they credited us with our years of service from StatSoft for purposes of vacation time and apparently nifty plaques.

In the words of President Bartlet, "What's next?" Well, I'm glad you asked.

• Stay up to date with current trends and conversations in the software industry
• Advocate within the organization and to anyone else who will listen about software quality and strategies for achieving and maintaining quality. 
• Become proficient in Python 
• Read, read, read.  Become knowledgeable enough to have opinions and to back them up with data or examples. 
• Be proactive.  Speak up to make sure stakeholders know the relevant bits of information and my overall assessment of the status of product.  When important conversations about the product are being held, making sure I'm in the room so that I have all the information I need to make good decisions about where to focus my time. 
• Attend a software testing conference.  It will never be convenient to miss work or to be out of town, but short-term sacrifices are sometimes needed for long-term growth. 

Tulsa Agile Practitioners Meetup

Last week, I made it a priority to attend a meetup group that I had been wanting to visit for a while: 
Tulsa Agile Practitioners (TAP)

It was conducted in an Open Space format - with several topics on the wall with a person willing to lead a discussion.  Pick a topic, find a chair, sit down, listen, and talk.

The conversation could have lasted hours or days, however long the donated Chick-Fil-A supply sustained us. 

My group didn't talk directly about Agile.  We talked about software quality, approaches to advocate for the craft of constructing software, approaches to adding value that can't be automated or easily outsourced...It was nice to find a group of folks in town where Uncle Bob is mentioned casually like he's an actual relative, you overhear things like "Clean Code changed my life", and people crack wise about using Agile principles to put the meeting room tables and chairs back together to their original state. 

A+, will attend again.

UX checklist for desktop applications - Microsoft MSDN

Found this to be a fun, if perhaps overly nit-picky read.  I will cite it in the future if I need to justify a preference I have about a dialog or other UX element. 

UX checklist for desktop applications

I won!

I'm a frequent attendee of RBCS webinars.  There was a presentation on Monday titled "Why Does Software Quality Still Suck" which I listened in on (video here).  Rex Black fired another shot in the testing standards war, which I'm looking forward to hearing some context-driven responses on.
For each of Rex's webinars, an attendee is chosen by drawing to receive a free e-learning course. I won!! That's two exclamation points, indeed. So for the next three months, I'm going to immerse myself in the ISTQB Certified Tester Advanced Technical Test Analyst E-Learning training course.