Monday, April 18, 2011

TWiST #41 - with Michael Larsen




Sorry for the delay in getting this up, had a busy Friday and weekend. Besides, I always feel a little funny talking about myself when I do an interview.


One thing I will share, though, is that when you listen to yourself off script, you notice some interesting ticks. Whereas I said in the past I don’t typically say “um or ah”, that’s not to say that I don’t have my own verbal idiosyncrasies. The one that I noticed most tellingly this time through for me is that, when I feel anxious or unprepared, I tend to “double speak”. No I don’t mean I’m evasive with answers, I mean that I tend to say things twice. It’s the old “I’m going to tell you something, tell you, and then tell you what I told you. That may be effective in a classroom or in a talk, but it’s annoying in an interview. Needless to say, I was brutal with the editing because of this, so if you hear what feels like stutters in the interview, I figured you’d be more willing to deal with that then me repeating myself ad nauseum (LOL!).


This week’s interview was originally recorded on April 1st, and because of that, we decided it would be fun to mess with the format a bit, including the theme song. Some of you may know this, but for those who don’t we change the theme song every 20 shows. Since this was show 41, we were going to change the song anyway, but Matt thought it would be funny for this show to inject Rebecca Black’s viral YouTube track “Friday” into the mix. We figured if anyone could roll with it and not feel like they were being made fun of, it would be me (and they would be right ;) ). Next week wee will have a different theme, and that will run us out for the next 19 episodes.


This week I talked a bit about my transition from a traditional development environment to an Agile one, and some of the interesting challenges that entails. I also talked a biot about some of the interesting quality environments and expectations with certain products (such as video games, especially before the auto-update abilities of more recent systems), and I also talked a bit about Weekend Testing in the Americas. If you’d like to hear the interview, listen to Episode #41.

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 :).

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