Ridgeback Tested

My wife and I took the Ridgeback for her first tracking class last Saturday at the Oak Ridge Kennel Club. It was basically an introduction to tracking for the handlers, with a short hands-on exercise with the dogs to wrap things up. The exercise was not to have the dogs track at this point; the instructors wanted to get the dog to realize that there is something “out there” for them to find, and when they do find it they hit the jackpot with treats galore, exuberant praise, and playtime. The idea is to get the dogs to follow a trail of food from a starting point with one article, usually a sock or a glove, to the end where a matching article is located. We laid the track by using a survey flag to mark the start of the track, and we would place the first article on the ground, step on it, and place a piece of food on top of it. We would then walk twelve to fifteen steps, place another survey flag, get the dog’s attention, wave the second article around while they were watching, the...

It's time for Techtoberfest at work – a technology summit held every October that provides an opportunity for employees from all over the company to sign up and present on a technology of their choice. It’s traditionally been very developer-heavy, and submissions from my team are often rejected with a quick “we already have a presentation about testing, we don’t need any more.” But there was a changing of the guard this year, and a new group was asked to take it over and revamp it. Seeing an opportunity to beat our own drum and show off the hard work the test automation group had put into completing the model-driven automation framework, I asked the automation lead to submit a presentation. As we were brainstorming about the presentation, we came up with the idea to use the AutoTweet PowerPoint add-in to tweet the talking points as the presentation progressed. We created a Twitter account to use (@ScrippsQA), installed the add-in, and got to work on the presentation. It wasn’t...