Wow, it takes a long time to make a website that has nice content on it! But here it is. Satisfice 2.0. All modernized. The design is down to Mary Alton. She researched the themes and plug-ins, too. If it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t ever have upgraded my site. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mary. The content is mostly mine, with the tireless review and editing of Michael Bolton, my business partner (and husband of Mary… maybe someday Michael will get a new website, too).
Highlights of The Changes
- WordPress. The entire site is in WordPress, now.
- RST Methodology. We have rewritten and expanded our description of the RST methodology.
- Exploratory Testing. We have new material on the exploratory nature of software testing.
- New Classes. We have developed new training for RST, and reorganized the curriculum.
- Downloads. We have retired some of the old PDFs once offered on this site, while updating some and adding new ones.
- Bibliographies. Using Zotero, we’ve created bibliographies of useful scholarly papers on subjects related to our approach to software testing.
Advisories
- I am a tester, and I have tested this site before I put it up. However, I wasn’t able to test it under production conditions. Besides, I’m the developer of this site, so I am bound to have blinders on. I am expecting broken links, at the very least. I’m expecting obvious problems and obscure problems. I appreciate hearing about problems if you see them, but I will strive to test in production to find them before you do.
- If you left a comment in the last couple of months then it got bumped off the site due to the way the import process worked. I posted them back manually, so I think you won’t notice a difference.
I did some testing of the site as well, with James and alone. Always impressed at how fast he thoughtfully considers my findings and suggestions, and implements improvements.
[James’ Reply: A couple of problems you reported I decided not to fix because they were minor and cosmetic. But then they got reported a second time from users… So they are getting fixed now. Sorry!]
This comment and reply are an excellent demonstration of a typical situation – smaller cosmetic problems don’t get fixed until users start to report them.
In the context of the products I am testing, these kind of problems are the difference between our competitors and us, and this is why they are important for me as a tester to advocate for them. In the context of my previous job, those weren’t considered nor fixed, ever, because we built business applications for the government (there are no competitors in that landscape).
[James’ Reply: Good point. Actually this is fascinating for me to experience. Before I released the site I was using a different filter for quality, because I wanted to get this site deployed in January and it has been a long process of taking deep breaths when realizing that there were critical things that had to be done before release. These things have take weeks and weeks to resolve. Among other things, we had to get the Rapid Software Testing site updated to match the content in this one. We had to agree on our approach to marketing. We had to debug problems introduced by plug-ins.
As soon as it did ship, I found my standards went up, and things that seemed liveable (like that each item in the downloads section had two download buttons instead of one) seemed not good enough.]
Only to congratulate you for the new RST website.
More clean and organized.
Cheers from Portugal.