Excel Roundup
As assumed, my job duties shifted and I haven’t been digging deep into software engineering and use cases recently. The project is on hold and in the mean time, I’ve been developing some spreadsheets…which I really love doing. My boss requested some charts and graphs on our monthly sales data–however, she specifically wanted something that wasn’t a pain to update every month.
- Enter dynamic charts in excel! Peltier Tech at http://peltiertech.com/Excel/Charts/Dynamics.html has been a invaluable resource for me in this.
- I’ve used Excel’s name manager here and there a bit, but through this I’ve become much more familiar with using it.
- In addition, I’m now best friends with the popular excel functions: index, match, and offset.
As I find time, I’d like to create a few tutorials to show exactly how I’ve used these. The web is already bloated with excel tips, but it’d be mostly helpful for myself to record the how and what of all I’ve been learning.
The finished spreadsheet went out yesterday, with the request for feedback. A few suggestions from management have trickled back, the foremost being better readability on mobile devices. I’ll tackle reformatting it next week and experimenting with the best way to present information both for desktops and mobile. When I did a few quick searches, I was surprised by the lack of information on making spreadsheets visually compatible for mobile devices. Plenty there about finding apps for editing the spreadsheets, though
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Tags: dynamic charts, excel, excel for mobile, index, match, offset, peltier tech
Lean Consulting
I’ve learned a lot from this blog the last few days. Plenty of diagrams and sketches for those visual learners likes me!
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Tags: agile, kahban, lean, rup, xp
StorageBinBlog meets storage bin
Requirements
There’s a lot to peruse here when it comes to ‘Managing Requirements’; I don’t understand half of it, a few of the links are broken, but it looks to be a great resource that I don’t want to lose.
http://willhardy.com.au/media/portfolio/requirements/SRS.pdf
The Software Requirements Specification document for an open source, small business accounting software. I think this was probably created as a university project and not actually developed into software, but it provides a helpful example of requirements as they relate to a basic accounting software.
http://tynerblain.com/blog/2006/01/04/foundation-series-structured-requirements/
Tyner Blain consults as a “product manager, business architect, and business analyst”. He writes a foundation series and I link landed on his article on Structured Requirements.
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~taylor/
Richard Taylor. …Love finding the personal web sites of experts and having access to the wealth of knowledge and experience they’ve gained over years. Richard Taylor is a Professor of Information and Computer Science at the University of California at Irvine. I landed on his site via a search for an example of requirement documents, which he posted in ’04 on his online syllabus for Introduction to Software Engineering. From there, I found this pdf slideshow, which includes a beginner introduction to requirements, which I want to read through.
http://www.cdl.edu/uploads/Qd/S6/QdS615B1DcnwRZlnSuTDnQ/writing-requirements.pdf
A compact how-to on writing a requirements document published by the CSU Center for Distributed Learning.
Update: I also found their article Using Scenarios to Gather Requirements very helpful.
Requirements Document Template
Can’t tell you how I arrived at this, but it’s a template for a requirements document that has some points I want to remember.
Testing
http://www.carnegiequality.com/
The best test case plan, scenarios and script templates I’ve found. Brad Kuhn explains his templates well and they actually seem useful, unlike many of the templates that pop up in a google search. His blog post on managing testing provides some helpful dos and don’ts for someone like me who is brand new to testing.
http://www.exampler.com/testing-com/writings.html
“Brian Marick was a programmer, tester, and team lead in the 80′s, a testing consultant in the 90′s, and is an Agile consultant this decade” …first stumbled on his article of classic testing mistakes. I forwarded a few of his articles on to my husband, who actually works as a software developer.
Unrelated:
http://www.budgetoffice.arizona.edu/documents/BusinessAnalysis.pdf
I mentioned BA—business analysts—earlier; this is something I’m considering as a possible career path. In my search for some other documents though, I found this analysis of the budget process for Arizona University. I don’t have time to read through entirely right now, but it’s something I might want to come back to, both because I think it’d be interesting to understand the budgeting process at a university and because I want to understand what an analysis document in this situation looks like.
Filed under: new job, software testing, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Tags: ba, brad kahn, brian marick, business analyst, Rachel S. Smith, requirement template, requirements, richard taylor, scenarios, software engineering, software requirements, software testing, test plans, test scripts, test templates, testing, testing resources, testing template, tyner blain, user requirements
software testing, anyone?
It’s been 4 months at my new job now. Without going into too many details about how I got here and how I got to what I’m doing now—the last few weeks have been full of exploration into what is much more closely aligned to computer science/software testing/BA than ‘finance’.
Currently, I’m taking (given?) charge of the testing of a new ERP application that’s being implemented. Our consultants have some out-of-the-box test scripts, but they’re not sufficient for the myriad of changes we’ve made to the out-of-the-box product. Issues? Well, I don’t have a thorough list of user requirements. I don’t have a test plan. Or testing scenarios and scripts. Yet. But a week into digging around the vast resources of the internet, the terms use cases, kanban, agile, rtm, and acceptance testing, aren’t foreign to me and I have a plan for a test plan. Given the slight volatility of my job duties, I can’t be too excited but I am; I’m learning and I love it.
P.s. perk of my new job? We’re not too big to stop using the small officer supplier that we’ve done business with for years—and they bring me Twizzlers every time they bring more supplies by the office.
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Tags: agile, new job, rtm, software testing, test cases, test plans, user requirements
The Art of Complex Problem Solving
The Art of Complex Problem Solving
Not a bad idea: it appears to me like Idiagram is using this really fascinating graphical representation of the the problem solving process to market his ability to make really great graphical representation of the steps to solving your problem.
Click on the link though, really. It’s interactive.
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Thanks, Kierstyn
Some people are just really cool. Like Kierstyn King. You know, she’s a large part of why I opened this blog.
A Very Long Time Ago (2008, I believe)
Kierstyn has been blogging over at kieryking.com for a while now–she’s so relaxed there and I love that. I never really blogged before because I was too self-conscious about my writing and content. But I realized recently, thanks to Kiery, that I can just blog and write for fun. It’s okay: the blogging police won’t eat me. Actually, there are no blogging police; it’s wonderful.
Kierstyn pursues creativity and I admire this a lot–over the years I’ve known her, I’ve seen her try so many new art forms: everything from oil, watercolor, filming, character development, book writing, comic strips, oh the list goes on. As a recent college grad who has spent the last 4 years being swallowed up by finance homework, I feel like all of my creativity expired. Kiery has inspired me to pursue creativity again though. Last week, Amber and I sketched. Michael and I plan to start taking dance lessons (soon, hopefully!) and I’m hankering after voice lessons. I’m remembering that I want to be a graphic designer and I think maybe even I could decorate my house.
There’s more too though. Kierstyn thinks about ideas and hasn’t been afraid to challenge convention. She’s willing to change. She’s also super smart, really cute, and makes websites uses fireworks and publishes books and cooks food and sews cloaks.
So there is it is. She probably didn’t know it, I didn’t until recently, but Kierstyn is an inspiration to me and has definitely affected the way I think about life and challenged me to pursue things I wouldn’t think of otherwise. Thank you, Kierstyn!
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Tags: creativity, inspiration, kiery
The End
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