Welcome to Extraordinary Squares!

Welcome to my new blog about testing at Tableau!

Tableau is a company that helps you see and understand your data.  You can read all about us at www.tableau.com, get a free version of Tableau and create an account there.

I work on the Statistics team here.  Right off the bat, I was a little confused about this team.  Internally, I was thinking that "All of Tableau is about statistics, so how can there be just one team for that?"  Now that I have been awhile, I see all that we do, from connecting to databases (to get data for statistical analysis), to loading the data (not at all easy), to drawing maps, creating a web client, hosting servers, etc.. Etc.. Etc..  There is a lot to Tableau!

The goal of this blog is to roughly mimic my former OneNote Testing blog and talk about the challenges the test team here faces, how we address them and work to ensure Tableau is the best in class application available.  I may (probably will) have an occasional tip or two as well.

One regret I had with my former blog was the name: specifically, the URL I used.  I wish I had not had my name in the URL.  So this time, I went for what I think is a cool and slightly punny name: Extraordinary Squares.  Ordinary squares is a statistical test to determine if a line fits data (more on that later) and Extra-ordinary because, well, we are extraordinary! 

Squares is also a pun.  I was at a meeting with some of the people on my team and someone mentioned we were changing a ratio from 13:8 to 14:8.  Someone else said, "That messes up everything."
I said, "Yeah, that even messes up our Fibonacci Golden Ratio."
Everyone in the room laughed.

So yeah, squares.

Let's get started testing Tableau!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John