Amazingly, the people I have been interviewing have not discovered my website and/or blog; or if they have, they have not mentioned it. As the interviewer though, I research each of my candidates to find everything I can about them online before meeting them. Given this astonishing fact, I feel safe in sharing the format and questions I use for candidates of testing positions without giving people the chance to prepare.
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Every tech-oriented person I know has a standard set of tools they install on a machine when they get assigned to it. Recently I’ve found that I include Tomcat in my list. Not only does it serve regular html and jsp out of the box, but with a bit of web.xml trickery you can have it running python and perl applications as well.
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If your product/service is one you host yourself, it is common practice to have a staging environment that replicates the production environment for final certification, etc. One lesson I am in the midst of learning is that you need to do regular audits of your staging and production environments to make sure they are in sync. It is now 2AM and we’ve been hunting down WL -> Oracle issues for an hour. I don’t know the exact cause, but the official developer reason is “a difference between how we are doing things in staging vs production”. Doh. The long night just got longer…

I blogged previously about Fortune magazine’s Secrets of Success article. Turns out, this was part of a series. Here is my notes for the Secrets of Greatness issue (the link doesnt work at time of posting, but will in a couple days — I think).

Oh, and they have all be collected as a book now.
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Back here I talked a bit about who I think should comprise a test team. The following is a bit more of a discussion about the segregation of duties within the team.
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