Monday, July 23, 2012

"Enterprise English": the Confusion of Tongues

La parole a été donnée à l'homme pour déguiser sa pensée.
(Speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts.)
~ Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord


Engraving The Confusion of Tongues by Gustave Doré (1865)

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, English vocabulary pertinent to science and technology has been growing at an unprecedented pace. The Information Age, with new technologies springing up like mushrooms after a rain shower, has accelerated this growth even further. Business lexicon has manifested similar tendencies.

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Unless You Really Want to Look Like a Fool, Don't Save on Software Testing

From time to time, I just can't resist the temptation to do some ad hoc testing of business web applications I run into on the Internet. I've been doing it for years off and on (no penetration or any other disruptive testing, of course), and, although I don't keep statistics, my subjective feeling is that web apps have gotten much buggier lately. What's even worse is that the nature of the bugs I come across these days makes me wonder whether whoever is in charge of those applications just slaps them together as quickly as possible and puts them in production without any testing at all.

If you think I am exaggerating, let me give you an example.