Over the past eighteen months, the single greatest lesson I have learned about software was in the gym. That is, the human body works as a system. When you lift a heavy box, every muscle group in the chain lifts the box. The best way to strengthen those muscles is to work the body as […]
More on the “Attack on the Testing Role”
About a month ago I took a slide from James Bach’s Orcas Island Training and posted it to twitter. The internet became very upset, I suspect more from the writing style than the content. As the person who posted a single slide without context, I felt obligated to explain and wrote up a 1,600 word […]
Make Testing Great … Again?
Yesterday, as I was attending James Bach’s course reinventing testers, I took a picture of a slide that I knew would be contentious … and tweeted it. The responses were as acrimonious as the original text, and my response, which boiled down to “hey man, it’s not my slide” fell short. Jared Quinert asked me […]
“Must have Agile/Scrum Experience”
Recently, someone asked me what “Must have Agile/Scrum Experience” in job descriptions and advertisements actually means. It got me thinking, so I wrote it up for Medium.com What’s medium, you ask? It’s a relatively new website designed for shorter, more personal writing. There are no ads on it, writers are not compensated; I’m using it […]
We’re going to Orcas Island
“The shoemakers children have no shoes” may be a common expression, but it is common because it is true enough, enough of the time. The mechanic’s car is a beater that goes without repair, the doctor refuses to get help about his back, the trainers and consultants don’t pay for training. That might be true […]
What have we been up to?
It’s been a busy few months at Excelon. The New York Trip, a brief European tour, Justin went to Boston for STPCon, thanksgiving, lots of writing – actually lots and lots of writing, just not any of it here. Let me tell you about it. Before all that happened, over the summer, Joe Colantonio interviewed […]
Footprints in the Sand
I came across a lot of ideas in graduate school. Some, like Test Driven Development, Extreme Programming and Scrum skyrocketed my career forward. Others were models – a way of seeing the world – that were on the way out. I am particularly struck with how we thought about the test “phase” in my introduction […]
Save Our Scrum
Ken Schwaber, a co-creator of scrum, says that roughly 25% of teams trying the method realize the gains they had hope. More teams call themselves “Scrumbut”, “Scrumerfall”, or “Scrumish” than claim to be doing it right. It is as if something conspires to make Scrum ineffective. Let me be frank. Scrum is designed to expose […]
New Articles — and an announcement
I just got back from interop, the conference for emerging technologies that connect business – from data center to cloud to switches, servers, and software. It was an incredibly busy week. You might not have been there, but the “dessert first” part of the story is all of the articles that came out of the […]
Testing Philosophy II –
About every four months, Shrini Kulkarni convinces me to drop the term “Test Automation” from my vocabulary. After all, testing is a creative, thinking process. We can automate some steps of what we are doing, speeding up repetitive work – but those don’t turn out to be the investigative, critical thinking steps(*). Still, I want […]
My theory of software testing – I
What’s the right mix of exploratory testing, “planned” manual testing, and test automation? My short answer is “it depends.” Now, you don’t need to point out that “it depends” is non-helpful – I realize that – and I am going to try to go beyond it. The reason I say “it depends” is that it […]
Certifiable – III
I am drafting a reply to the agile-leadership group, but posting it here first. Several people (including me), asked what problem certification solves, or who the “customer” is for the certification. To which Alistair Cockburn replied: Back in message 416 or thereabouts I wrote: “In both cases, the market is so hungry for an agile […]
Certifiable – II
Another post, this one to the agile-management list … Ron Jeffries Wrote:A leadership certification, one would imagine, would perforce be far less specific and far more general, but just as likely to be interpreted as indicating that the certificate holder is qualified, surely more qualified than her colleagues around her who do not hold the […]
Certifiable?
The Agile Project Leadership Network is working on a certificate program in Agile Leadership. This has been discussed a bit on the Agile Leadership Yahoo group. I just emailed a reply and thought I would share it here .. Ron “The Don” Jeffries Wrote:>But rightly so. My lack of comments on the topic should be […]
Agile Shark Jumpin’ – IV
I turns out that my Collegue, Jim Brosseau has been going through some of the same issues that I have. Jim and I don’t totally agree on every issue (who does?), but he does say some things in a recent newsletter that I think are rather profound, and I’m going to provide a couple of […]
Shark Jumpin’ – II
Ben Edwards commented yesterday that in TV Shows, the characters age and the writers need to introduce new characters or plotlines to keep things interesting. Those things may make the show jump the Shark, argues Ben, but Agile has “just been around for a while and is gaining followers ad people, tired of the old […]
Agile Jumped the Shark? – I
On Happy Days, there was an episode where Fonzie jumped a shark tank on his motorcycle. Many people consider that the “high water” mark of the show, and believed that once the show reached that pinnacle, it had no where to go but down. There is even a website, JumpTheShark.com, devoted to chronicalling when TV […]
XP, Dear XP …
Extreme Programming in Japan? You’ve got to see this video. Don’t worry, it has subtitles, and it’s only three minutes long.
Canary in a Coal Mine
There is an interesting talk in Info.com by Ken Schwaber. Ken is a co-author of the agile manifesto and co-inventor of Scrum. If you don’t want to listen for an hour, move the slider to 29 minutes – the section on magic thinking and lies. If you get hooked, you can come back to the […]
Agile Metrics
Someone on the Agile-Testing list asked about test metrics for his SEI/CMM compliance effort. Here’s my reply: I have one graph, which is a stacked-line graph. On the X axis I have time. On the Y axis I have deliverables. Each deliverable has phases – need requirements, in dev, in software engineering test, in customer […]