And so it (temporarily) ends

This is the last post I’ll be making from Front Royal. Those who may have gotten used to multiple posts a day will find themselves sadly disappointed in the upcoming months. There’ll be no posts for the next few days (I’ll be without net access as I drive back home then spend the weekend with […]

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 […]

Quotes from nearby

“Can you put a lizard in your head? Yes. Is putting a lizard in your head better than cheese?” “We’re all zombies on a train” “So, we’re not actually using the brains we have now” “So, in addition to stopping on a brain, you can also stop on other people” :”you might choose to leave […]

Dinner conversations

A few tidbits from dinner conversations: First, a couple of nights ago, Bret was talking about psychological barriers that hold us back. The example he gave was that maybe he wasn’t as successful as a developer because he didn’t want to redesign people’s code. This got me to pondering. I’m generally prone to avoid controversy. […]

More observations

* Brian observed that it was interesting pairing because it seemed that at any given moment he wasn’t as confident in the code and his understanding of the code as it has historically been on his own (but as long as the sum total of confidence was ok, he was ok with that). He attributed […]

BC’s thoughts on Ruby

BC posted a writeup over on her livejournal about her thoughts on Ruby after this week. Her post also makes me remember that none of my LJ friends show up on my blogroll…. need to do something about that perhaps. Anyhow, here’s BC’s post: http://www.livejournal.com/users/bcholmes/56382.html. Update: Fixed the link. An extra colon migrated in

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 […]