I’m pondering why it seems so easy to pump out blog posts today, the day after TestRetreat and the day before CAST 2013. Here are my first impressions: It’s easy to forget that people are interested in what we have to say when we are mired in the everyday routine of our lives. It’s easy […]
Development
Posts about the actual act of developing software. Most of the time, this will be posts about actually coding, but at times, this category will include posts about the entire process of software development as well.
New Testers and Awe of “Experts”
I have been doing a lot of interviews in the last year for permanent and consultant testers and one question I always ask is who they follow in blogs or who they have read to learn about and improve their skills as testers. On the rare occasion that the interviewee actually gives me a name […]
How development debt becomes a Hydra
When we talk about “technical debt” it seems to convey the idea that you are creating an obligation to fix things later that will behave nicely and predictably, like an open balance on your credit card. You know what you over-spent, it will grow over time due to a pre-specified interest rate, and possibly late […]
Naked/Ironman CRC
Michael F. gave us a demo of what he calls “Naked CRC” or “Ironman CRC”. This is a technique that he uses to explain systems visually, using motion and spatial relationships. It’s a bit hard to explain completely textually, so if you ever get the chance have him demonstrate it for you. Basically, the technique […]
Wrap-up
Cem prepared this list to help us discuss the outcome of this workshop. We spent this morning discussing and refining it (with John moderating, which I mention so that he can get his Toastmaster’s credit 🙂 ). All of these things are in the context of testing on an agile project, where people typically shift […]
Guest post from James Bach
One of the things that I (Andy) don’t feel like I conveyed well in this blog is some of the conflict that came out in our discussions. I think my failure in this regard stemmed from two pieces — the conflict aversion I described a few posts back, and the fact that this was a […]
Day 6
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 […]
Observations
Tonight we spent the after dinner session taking a first crack at describing what we’ve learned from the session so far. I imagine we’ll be revisiting the topic again in the next couple of days, but here’s the slightly annotated list of points we came up with tonight… Managing XP with cards is like chartered […]
Metrics in XP
This post is in more of a notes style than my previous ones. I was originally planning on making this more prose-like, but I’m not going to after all. I kind of like the way it reads now. Maybe it’ll lead to more questions, but I’m going to call it a blogging experiment. 🙂 Cem […]