A voice recital on Sun­day, May 7 by Rachel and many great local musi­cians fea­tur­ing new­ly com­posed music. Takes place at Zion Luther­an Church. Invi­ta­tion to Bloom Recital on NowPlayingUtah.com

I spent the bet­ter part of five days last week play­ing the newest board games at a con­ven­tion in Seat­tle. It was quite a change from the board game con­ven­tion I usu­al­ly go to, where play­ers have about 40 hours… Read morenew board games run­down

Last week, I final­ly did what I’ve been want­i­ng to do for months (years) and engaged in pair test­ing three times with some dif­fer­ing results. what is pair test­ing? Pair test­ing is a lot like pair pro­gram­ming, where you have… Read morepair test­ing adven­tures

I attend­ed the Con­fer­ence of the Asso­ci­a­tion for Soft­ware Test­ing (CAST) two weeks ago in Cocoa Beach, Flori­da. It was a fan­tas­tic learn­ing and net­work­ing expe­ri­ence over four days, and I’m still reel­ing a lit­tle bit. I start­ed with a… Read moreCAST ret­ro­spec­tive

Last year, I wrote some thoughts about the ben­e­fits of man­u­al test­ing. The posts are here and here. Now that I’ve been on an agile team for over a year, and doing some automa­tion, I think (hope) I have some… Read moreautoma­tion thoughts — an update

For Christ­mas of 2015, Carl and I decid­ed to plan a year of dates. We alter­nat­ed months and planned an activ­i­ty around town (or at least with­in dri­ving dis­tance), try­ing to keep the over­all bud­get down, but allow­ing for a… Read moretwo years of dates

I may have men­tioned a few months ago that I’m train­ing a tester who is new to mobile. We’re four months in, and I’m sur­prised to find that I’m still answer­ing (many) ques­tions dai­ly. Lan­guage does play an impor­tant role,… Read moretrain­ing a tester

I like my employ­er, and I like my new career as a soft­ware tester, and though I strive to be excel­lent, when I leave work, I do my best not to think about it until the next day. I’ll some­times… Read morefind­ing pur­pose

I’ve been delv­ing into the more tech­ni­cal side of test­ing, that of using tools to exer­cise code pre­cise­ly rather than galumph­ing through UI, which real­ly is my pre­ferred method. Our mobile app uses a light­weight ser­vice to con­nect to the… Read moreSOAP test­ing and find­ing the right asser­tions

We have a new tester on my team. I recruit­ed her, and I talked her up to my team. They liked her, and I was excit­ed when it worked out. She’s not new to test­ing, but she’s new to mobile,… Read morelan­guage and learn­ing