Gates meets Gabo + Sólo Pruebas

I have been off the blog a few weeks but alert. The MS developments, Gates announcing retirement plus some defections to Google, reminds me of "Crónica de Una Muerte Anunciada" not because anybody died but because of the fatefulness.

I remember that right around the time MS started its war with Netscape, somebody from the WSJ, or the financial world for sure, wrote an article which stated that MS had already lost the www train. This was almost 8 or 9 years ago.

The PR machine launched "The Road Ahead", some "changes" happened at MS that aligned the company with the new reality, Netscape was blown off the earth.

But these days, it is the same story: somebody writing about MS not getting the gist of the www, etc. It's a little bit like deja vu...

Last week, I was in Madrid for an industry event called "Sólo Pruebas". It was a good opportunity to see what people is doing around Spain, look for prospective partners, and check the competition, etc.

It was funny to see how Acme calls B its new version of tool A. It is just tool A bundled with something else. Instead of making things simpler and more effective, the prevailing theme still seems to be keep on selling bloatware.

There were a couple of announcements made by Emca that makes this company look like a acquisition target by Acme. But this is just my impressions.

It is interesting to see how the big established players use the QA metrics. There was this talk on the first day where one of the slides pointed out that yes testing and debugging takes up to 80% of any project.

What they failed to mention was this figures was a lot smaller 20 years ago. I guess if they had mentioned that they would have to admit that their product has helped to grow that ugly stat...

One would think that...

After all the unfulfilled promises that the spanish national team has provided its supporters over numerous soccer world cups, people would react more cautiously to a good match (4-0 over Ukraine on the opener)

After all, Ukraine could have had a bad afternoon.

But politicians from the left to right are trying to score some points. This match reflects the triumph of the Spain as seen from the left, right, up, down, south or north.

Funny, if the team loses in the quarter-finals, as it has happened since 1950, are the politicians going to blame the other side too?

During a weekend when Alonso got closer his second F1 title, and Nadal won his second straight French Open, what is all the fuss about? A good game?

Until Spain reaches the final and wins it, the press should pay more attention to other issues:

Did you know that Wayne Rooney's transfer fee is 8 times the total amount invested in seed money in Spain and bigger than the seed money invested in France (both figures for 2005)?

Ain't that funny?

Our own private Ermitao...

My family and ancestors have been living in these lands for several centuries. This allows us to claim as "ours" some really pleasant spots away from the crowds, and "around the block".

The term "ours" means that I have not seen anybody other than my cousins trout fishing or us bathing/wading during the peak of the summer.

These pictures were from two weeks ago:


Looking up while getting there...


The little fellow and the older fellow...


Waiting for us...

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We apologize for the inconvenience. The plugin snapshots and dynamic array *.jpg files should be avalaible in the archives section.

Where was I?

"Quality is in the process not in the product" This tidbit of info from Deming is truly valuable. How many software shops use most of their budgets in hiring the best and brightest developers but have a much lighter quality control group? Like the 30 developers, 1 qa shop mentioned the other day.

Just from MMM, we know that there is a 30% chance that a change in one line of code will break something else downstream. Let's think about all the changes that occur in a day with 10 developers. It does not matter how good the developers are, things happen. Ask Nokia or MS.

So, it seems that the quality process should be a prerequisite to a good development team, otherwise the effort of that talented team is less than effective: how many companies with truly competent developers release products late that require patches?

The process, I think is what is missing: not a checklist of things that when in place they make a process. Saying that we need a rocket to reach the moon does not make anyone a rocket scientist.

Less beta is more beta (we hope)

For the beta, we decided that the most important things we needed to convey were:

• simplicity,
• speed,
• ease of use

So, we are taking out the dynamic array logic, the load/stress/performance features, and are including a limited set of AWT and Swing widgets to demonstrate how our approach to GUI quality control is more effective than capture-and-replay. The beta will also include the "GUI accelerated mode": which is bassically a feature that bypasses a lot of the friction caused by screen repaints thus increasing the effectiveness of the GUI tests.