About Me

I have been doing software testing since about 1990.  When I started out, all we had was character screen capture-playback tools that created very brittle tests.  Autotester for Windows was the first automated Windows testing tool I used.

 Since then I have used a number of commercially created, automated test tools and developed some of my own.  I believe that the expense of most of the commercial test tools is out of line for what they provide.  I am usually disappointed in the quality of the commercial test tools.  In addition, once a company purchases one of these tools, they try to use if for all their test needs even though it may not be the best tool for the job.  Recently I have used Fit and FitNesse.  I now use Ruby and Watir for most of my automated testing although I will use anything I think works for what I am trying to test.  I am a big fan of Open Source tools and support that community.

I have worked in many waterfall test environments but now I work almost exclusively in Agile environments and would not go back to the old ways.  To me, an agile programming environment is the only way to get good working software out in a reasonable amount of time.