With things slowing down a bit, our Managing Director, Matt Heusser, has been out and about a little more, and we have new material. Given it’s been awhile since we’ve […]
Let’s get the band back together
It’s been eight years since we announced Software Delivery 24/7. The idea was to have a safe place to talk about software, a conference list, a resource list — a […]
Your Late Christmas Present
beautiful testing book cover If you wanted a Christmas present, I’m here for you. My last employer, Socialtext, developed one of the first long-term successful selenium implementations. We called them […]
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 […]
Make Software 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 in the Software Testing world … and […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.