On Software QA

Between transitioning to a new QA person at work (again!) and having a lot more software needing QA than QA time available, I've been taking a much closer look at our QA, the automated test environments they've been using, and doing a _lot_ of thinking about what that function should be and how it can be best served.

While I'll be writing a bit out this over time as my thoughts coagulate a little more, I happed to come across this article ( "A Bit Bugged About Lack of QA Respect" ) about Videogame QA which is interesting to see given that the Videogame QA folks are generally maligned for letting bugs through.

Windows Live Writer

Windows Live Writer is part of the Windows Live set of services and is basically a local app that will post to your blog for you. At first glance the value seems to be the ability to save local drafts. The editing options are a little better in that you aren't stuck in some Javascript WYSIWIG editing block.

Also interesting is that if you have multiple blogs, like say this one and the family one, you can easily switch back and forth between the two which is kinda nice.

You can also edit recent posts that you've made via Windows Live Writer along with managing your blog settings. What is a bit strange is that while you can manage blog settings, and if you edit a recent post, it will go get the actual post from the blog, it doesn't give you a way to edit posts that you didn't make from the tool.

Something else that it should do for a real value add is give you the option to search from the tool to get a URL to hot-link. Instead of my having to go look up the URL for Windows Live, I should've been able to highlight "Windows Live" and pick an option to do a web search to find the URL for a hot-link. That would provide extra value with the power of a desktop app.

On the whole this little app seems like a nice addition.