Friday, January 28, 2011

TWiST #30 – Tester’s Dinner at Jing Jing’s




So this was an interesting experiment!


Matt came to the Bay Area for SocialText’s all hands meeting, and as he was here, he thought it would be fun to have a bunch of people get together for a “tester’s dinner” while he was here. Since he was staying in Palo Alto, I thought it would be cool to go to Jing Jing’s, which is my favorite Chinese place in Palo Alto (Bay Area people, if you haven’t been to Jing Jing’s, seriously, go. The food is great, reasonably priced, and their Spicy Eggplant is to die for :).


I came over to Jing Jing’s and met up with Matt (this was the first time the two of us have met in person, btw) and a host of other Bay Area testers. The full list includes:


- Jane Fraser, a Director of QA at Electronic Arts
- Matt Heusser, software process naturalist and member of the technical staff at SocialText
- Yaron Kottler, CEO of Qualitest
- Michael Larsen, Senior Tester at SideReel (yeah, that would be me ;) ).
- Peter Magnusson, a Director of Engineering at Google
- Jake "Skinny Boy" McGuire, Infrastructure Lead at YouTube (Matt’s nickname, blame him :) )
- Jonathan Mischo, Manager, Quality and Support Engineering at Involver
- Ken Pier, Product Quality Manager at SocialText


The noise, bustle and movement is real, and it was a particularly challenging editing process. There’s a fair amount of noise that, while I was able to get rid of a lot of it, there’s some that was just not possible to remove without mangling the conversations, so you’ll hear a fair amount of bumping and banging of plates and stuff. The conversation ranges from some spectacular bugs found at YouTube and EA over the years, to giving career advice to testers to survive and thrive in the next five to ten years as testers. Oh, and to that effect, I should also mention that Involver and Qualitest ARE HIRING!!! So if you are interested in hearing the responses, please head on over and give TWiST #30 a listen!


Standard disclaimer:

Each TWiST podcast is free for 30 days, but you have to be a basic member to access it. After 30 days, you have to have a Pro Membership to access it, so either head on over quickly (depending on when you see this) or consider upgrading to a Pro membership so that you can get to the podcasts and the entire library whenever you want to :). In addition, Pro membership allows you to access and download to the entire archive of Software Test and Quality Assurance Magazine, and its issues under its former name, Software Test and Performance.

TWiST-Plus is all extra material, and as such is not hosted behind STP’s site model. There is no limitation to accessing TWiST-Plus material, just click the link to download and listen.

Again, my thanks to STP for hosting the podcasts and storing the archive. We hope you enjoy listening to them as much as we enjoy making them :).

No comments: