Aug 31, 2006 1:16:39 PM
Answer these questions with a high and a low value. Your answer should include the actual value in its range in order to be "right."
1. January 1, 2000 population of the world
2. The year of Napoleon's birth
3. Length of the Nile river
4. Maximum takeoff weight of a Boeing 747 airliner
5. Seconds for a radio signal to travel from the earth to the moon
6. Latitude of London
7. Minutes for a space shuttle to orbit the earth
8. Area of the Sahara desert
9. Height of the Great Pyramid
10. Number of bones in the adult human body
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Posted by webcowgirl @ Aug 31, 2006 1:16:39 PM [Link]
Aug 30, 2006 11:06:10 AM
Ability to Solve Problems
Tell me about the most difficult problem you had to solve in the past year. Did you make this decision alone or did you engage others in the decision? Why did you approach it this way? What was the outcome?
Tell me about the last time you had to escalate a problem to a higher level. What was the situation? What actions did you take before escalating it? What was the outcome? In retrospect, how would you handle this differently, if at all?
Tell me about a situation where you analysis of a problem crossed organizational boundaries. How did you approach this?
Action Oriented:
Tell me about a time you saw an opportunity that required immediate action or the opportunity would be lost. What did you do?
Tell me about the most exciting "breakthroughs" you ever achieved on a project or assignment. What was involved and why do you consider it a breakthrough?
Tell me about a project you worked on that had an aggressive timeline. How did you proceed? What did you do to ensure project objectives were met?
o Looking for not having over-planned, good sense of timing, bias for action, etc.
Drive for Results:
What results are you trying to achieve in your current position
Tell me about the last time one of your projects fell off track. How did you identify it was off track? What did you do to get it back on track?
How do you decide what to work on each day? How do you decide what your priorities are?
Tell me about an important deadline and the steps you took to meet it.
Tell me about a complex assignment or project you accomplished on your own. Did you initiate it? How did you get started on it?
Dealing with Ambiguity
Tell me about a time you started working one way, but events dictated a change. What was the change? What did you do? What was the outcome or result?
Describe a time when you changed your mind on an important issue, problem, or situation. What made you decide to change? Was it difficult for you to change your position? What did you learn?
o Looking for person's ability to see other, sometimes opposing perspectives, and use those to re-evaluate his/her own position.
Tell me about a time you were assigned a project you had to complete very quickly, yet you did not have all the information you needed. What did you do? What was the outcome?
Integrity and Trustworthiness
Tell me about a time when you knew, or had access to, sensitive information, and people were pressuring you to reveal it. What would have been the consequences of divulging it? How did you handle the situation?
Tell me about a situation when it was necessary for you to have the trust of others. What was the situation? How did you know that others perceived you as trustworthy?
Tell me about a time when you needed to take action or make a decision, and consideration of fairness was important. What did you do? What was the outcome?
Planning, Organizing and Coordinating
Tell me about a project you had to plan, organize and coordinate from beginning to end. Was it successful? Give me an overview of how you planned, organized and coordinated it. If you had it to do over, what would you do differently?
Tell me about a project you owned that crossed group or divisional boundaries. How did you keep the important parties informed? What problems did you encounter (organizing resources, coordinating schedules, etc.)? What were your solutions?
Describe your methodology for project estimating and scheduling. What strategy do you have to meet deadlines? How do you measure progress of a project?
Technical, Coding
Standard coding question, calibrate to STE or SDET accordingly
Testing question based on an large e-commerce company component
Please apply the above, experience-based "Tell me about..." questioning style to these stated technical competencies:
o Demonstrates knowledge and competence in their area of responsibility, effectively using skills and past experience to meet goals and expectations, while bringing value to the business
o Identifies areas of development and gaps in knowledge and addresses these
o Recognizes and applies the appropriate knowledge and skills to make effective decisions
o Acts as a resource to others by answering questions, providing guidance, helping to solve problems and assisting with work
o Is competent with latest software and technology relevant to their role and actively embraces technological change
Self Development & Composure
Tell me about a time when you received constructive negative feedback from someone. How did you handle it?
What have you done in the past year to develop your skills and abilities?
Tell me about a time you failed at something. What was the outcome
Note: Evaluate the extent to which the person learned from the failure.
Tell me about the last time you were extremely frustrated. Did you let others know you were frustrated? How did you work through this frustrating situation?
Tell me about a time when you observed others getting frustrated. Were you able to do anything to get them moving forward?
Tell me about the most serious disagreement you have had with a co-worker. How did you handle this? What was the resolution?
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Posted by webcowgirl @ Aug 30, 2006 11:06:10 AM [Link]
Aug 28, 2006 3:05:56 PM
I've been recommended to read some Samuel Delaney if I'm interested in linguistics. Specifically, I've been told that Babel-17 is good to read if you're interested in the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.
And, I'm a geek, so I say: gimme a copy now!
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Posted by webcowgirl @ Aug 28, 2006 3:05:56 PM [Link]
Aug 28, 2006 2:23:35 PM
I'm working on my presentation for work on project estimation, and I've got a nice outline written up I just wanted to SHARE WITH THE WORLD. Enjoy!
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Posted by webcowgirl @ Aug 28, 2006 2:23:35 PM [Link]
Aug 23, 2006 11:12:58 PM
It's been 12 years and I still don't know what happened to my friend Mike Aguirre. His dad (Eleno Aguirre) and sister (Dolores Contreras) got caught up in some bad stuff back in '94 and I never heard from them again. He was defended by John Leyba (?) in Las Cruces. Says here in the news article that they were all living in Deming. I found some references to them in some court documents but otherwise, nothing.
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Posted by webcowgirl @ Aug 23, 2006 11:12:58 PM [Link]
Aug 16, 2006 4:12:15 PM
I've been spending some time thinking about how to estimate test time for software development projects. By some time I mean about ten years, or maybe less - when I started this work, I just did stuff and moved forward and didn't bother thinking about how long it would take to do it.
So here are some things I evaluate when I'm trying to come up with the time it will take to test a project. First, I evaluate the "riskiness" of the code - what kind of changes are these? I do a lot of testing of web/e-commerce websites, so I came up with these three categories (and the amount of buffer time I would add in to an estimate for each sort of project).
Risk levels
UI only 0-10%
Solid code base 10-30%
Partner connectivity or new code 30-50%
Then I'll do a general breakdown of the code in terms of how long I think it would take to test it in "perfect engineering time," in days of about 6 hours work. This requires a fairly detailed project spec, at a level of detail where I can see what the different testing areas would be.
On top of this estimate, I need to add time for writing and researching and regressing bugs. The last project I had yielded 40% of time spent regressing/writing/researching bugs.
Once I get the perfect engineering time estimate down, I start thinking about what could go wrong. These items feed into the risk levels above, but also help me decide which end of the buffer I want to go toward. This buffer goes on top of the bug time plus perfect engineering time.
Risks
Type of change
Extent of change
"Newness" of code
Known previous concerns
Experience of team
Uncontrollable external issues
Then there are other things you may need to add on to the project, things that either reduce the amount of time you can test during a week or add on to the total time you need to get things done (but can be, say, done beforehand, or that may only have a temporary effect. Here's some of the things I've come up with that will affect the total amount of time you spend testing a project.
Extra stuff
BVT/Acceptance (if you have to do this twice a week, it will reduce the time you can spend testing)
Project meetings (some companies like to have a lot of these)
Test plan/case writing time (this can usually be done beforehand, but you should schedule the time)
Ramp up time (some of this may be done beforehand, but a lot of times the work the first two or three weeks may just be slow)
Test environment availability (if, for example, you have to take the environment down in order to prop new code, you can anticipate X amount of time will not be available for testing)
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Posted by webcowgirl @ Aug 16, 2006 4:12:15 PM [Link]
Aug 11, 2006 7:07:43 PM
I'm digging through my old notes from class (in this case POS 160, whatever it was) and found some notes on the role of perception in politics. One of these has stayed with me for some 20 years or however long it's been since I took the class, so I figured I'd write it down so I could refer to it again when I'm sitting there struggling for the words. (All of the rest of the notes for this class are going into the garbage, so I need to preserve this somewhere, and online seems as good a place as any ...)
The fundamental attribution error: to attribute the cause of a person's behavior to their disposition instead of the situation at hand. They do bad things because they are a bad person. (This tends to happen when someone has a lack of information about what's the other person's situation is.)
The ego-centric bias (this is the one I think of all of the time, also known as the "personalistic" bias): people tend to think other people's actions are directed toward them, especially if someone's actions keep them from achieving their own goals. For example, when Russia kept control of the countries "behind the Iron Curtain" after World War II, the US assumed it was an attempt to show Russia's power as opposed to a simple way to get food back into Russia after the devastation of the war.
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Posted by webcowgirl @ Aug 11, 2006 7:07:43 PM [Link]