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Showing posts from November, 2013

A Heuristic Approach to Generating “Good Enough” Weighted State Transition Probabilities

It started as a joke. Having recently watched the Big Bang Theory episode `The Herb Garden Germination` and reviewing too many resumes listing the same buzz words over and over, I had an idea: create some term or concept, inject it into the wild with enough backing information to make it sound legitimate, and see if it ever made it back to me in a resume and, if so, how long it took to get back to me. I needed something in an area that was being used where I worked as well as in enough other environments to be feasible, yet wasn't widely popular. The perfect candidate seemed to be model-based testing. So, I came up with the concept of Cross-Matrix Defect Analysis – multiplying a state transition matrix by a matrix of known defects to get a sort of weighted state transition matrix. I worked up a few formulas, wrote them on a whiteboard in a prime location at work, and recruited colleagues to help me plant the seeds so that when someone asked, “What’s that?” they could respon...