We discussed a little more testing this morning. I was still waking up, but here’s what I pulled out as key points in the discussion:
* End to end tests put the other tests in context
* 3 categories of tests: programmer, customer, tester
* Testers might look for risks that wouldn’t occur to the programmer
Cem also said I should write about the XP principle of a 40-hour work week, and how our blatant disregard for this principle has affected us. We’ve been doing roughly 12 hour days every day (though we did take Sunday afternoon off — some of us went looking for a geocache supposedly on the Appalachian Trail. I say supposedly because even with TWO GPS receivers, a laptop running Microsoft MapPoint, a large number of cell phones (which did nothing to help with the caching, but still….), and who knows what other bits and pieces of technology the 7 of us had, we couldn’t find the cache. Oh well — we had a nice walk in the woods :).
Anyhow, back to the 40 hour thing. It’s been obvious every day that people are getting more and more rundown. I haven’t gone back and read my entries but I’m guessing there’s a noticeable progression of quality decreases. I took some time off at dinner last night to play some pinball which helped a lot. Not sure what others are doing to recuperate. Anyhow, so now I’ve mentioned the effects of ignoring the 40-hour work week principle.
In other news, we have had a few pictures being taken this week. I don’t have image editing software on my laptop at the moment, so posting of these pictures will have to wait until I get back to MN (unless I can co-opt someone here who has said software to reduce the size of the images for me). Rest assured at least a couple will be coming, however.
We’ve been using quite a few books this week as well. Here’s a list of the books that I’ve found floating around (can you tell that we’re close to wrap up point and no one needs my help on their stories?) The books are listed in the order I found them as I walked around the table. I haven’t heard any complaints about any of them that are springing to mind at the moment:
- The Java Developer’s Guide to Eclipse by Sherry Shavor, Jim D’Anjou, Dan Kehn, Scott Fairbrother, John Kellerman, and Pat McCarthy
- Ruby in a Nutshell by Yukhiro Matsumoto
- The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton
- Programming Ruby: A Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt
- Ruby Developer’s Guide by Robert Feldt, Lyle Johnson, Michael Neumann (Editor), and Jonothon Ortiz
- Eclipse in Action: A Guide for the Java Developer by David Gallardo, Ed Burnette, and Robert McGovern
- Google Hacks by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest [I think this might have been a “someone was being shown this book” rather than a “we used this book” — as far as I know, we didn’t do anything with google]
- HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide by Chuck Musciano and Bill Kennedy
- SAMS Teach Yourself Ruby in 21 Days by Mark Slagell [When I wrote this post, this link wouldn’t load at Amazon for some reason. I could get everywhere else on the site, but it wouldn’t give me the detail page for this book.]
- Learning Unix for Mac OS X by Dave Taylor and Brian Jepson
- Mac OS X Jaguar: The Complete Reference by Jesse Feller
There was also one Ruby book that got removed from circulation pretty quickly. I haven’t looked at it, but was told that the book Making Use of Ruby was not worth the money that had been spent on it.
Well, nobody at the workshop seems to have been impressed with it, but I will still mention “Testing Extreme Programming” by myself and Tip House, also available on Amazon.com. I think agile testing has continued to grow and change since we wrote the book last year, but I think it provides a good foundation to anyone doing testing on an agile team.
I want to stress that the list was simply the books that I found on the table towards the end of the workshop. I did not mean to imply anything that I did not explicitly state in the post. I do have your book, Lisa, and it is on my reading list.