The Struggle to Read…Books
I used to read a lot. As a young person, I read novels, biographies, historical stuff. Nothing that would put me in the league of intellectuals but a mix of escapism content and substance. However, as I took stock of my habits the end of this past year, I realized it has been a long time since I’ve read much in the way of books. I read a handful each year, but not more than that. Some years less. Perhaps I am just another data point in the universe of short-burst communications that...
Read MoreSharpening the Saw
One of the benefits of being a free agent / contractor is that between contracts, you get to wipe the slate clean and start over. Downtime between gigs provides the opportunity to evaluate what worked and what didn’t in your last engagement and in general, assess and document what you learned. It also affords you the opportunity to overlay your last engagement with all your prior experiences. It’s quite interesting to see what similarities you find (in people, company cultures,...
Read MoreA Real Good Business Book
A few weekends back, while enjoying a beach day with family, I took along a book I had purchased a couple of months ago named “Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing Yourself”. It’s written by Alan Webber, one of the co-founders of Fast Company magazine. It looked like a quick read, ideal for an afternoon in the sun. Well, it wasn’t a quick read at all. It could have been but I enjoyed it enough that I found myself stopping fairly...
Read MoreSoftware Test Automation
Of the three testing books I read over the past few months, this one was the one that gave me the best overview of test automation as a discipline of its own. What was interesting to me is that the book was written some time ago (1999) and in some places it feels “old”. However, the authors have spent considerable time in this area and are very articulate about the principles that govern automation and these principles seem to me to still apply today based on projects I...
Read More.NET Test Automation Recipes
This book is for developers. It is well named because it’s a cookbook of code that illustrates how to test using various different automation approaches. I like the variety of different coding examples it showed and how widely the test automation approaches vary across these different types of code. The code samples are easy to try out and while you may only find a handful that help you on any given project, I suspect for the developer who is new to .net and is looking to learn a bit...
Read MoreImplementing Automated Software Testing
This was one of three books I read recently on test automation. The focus of this book is on how to make a case that test automation is a worthwhile initiative to pursue, how to build the business case for automation and assuming you are able to build that case, how to take the necessary initial steps to get an automation regime in place. What I liked most about this book was how it emphasized the need to separate the automation needs of a given project or projects from the need to get an...
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