Category: Software development

Making user stories work (by writing use cases instead)

I’ve had a few common rants on most of the agile projects I have worked on. Developers bogged down in the detail of stories, while the critical goals of the system wound up ignored, or realising at the last minute that all of the stories built would do nothing useful. The ideas I came to […]

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The essence of goal-driven design

I work with James, and he emailed this quote around the office – “UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.” (attributed to Doug Gwyn) I had forgotten about my response until I re-subscribed to his blog just now. “Unix needs an […]

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The essence of testing on agile projects

‘Capturing the essence’, or ‘core’, has been a key theme in some of my work recently, and in several of the books I’ve been reading. So over a drink with Michael Ruschena tonight a couple of these came out as we linked ‘the core’, ‘agile’, and haiku – poetry that captures the essence. I’ve been […]

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MAST Podcast – Agile testing experiences

I feel very ‘tech’ now. I’ve uploaded an edited audio version of the last MAST meeting, where we (Erik Petersen, Kristan Vingrys and me) attempt to answer John Gallagher’s questions about testing in agile projects. Find it at http://www.quinert.com/mp3/mast200709a.mp3 Enjoy! The three beeps protect the innocent. The first is a service provider, the second and […]

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Why is this still happening?

You would think that this kind of message would be a thing of the past, but apparently not. Or at least not when buying tickets to major exhibitions in Melbourne.

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Project Manifestos

Having worked on the trial project mentioned in Michael Ruschena’s recent blog entry on Project Manifestos, I can say it’s well worth trying out. And when I say ‘trying out’, I mean having the conversations and going through the thought processes required to figure out how you might work together as a team. I find […]

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Back to school…

I’m back at university, in an effort to force myself to knuckle down and get through the pain of learning Java. It’s been 16 years since I was last there, and here are a few of the things I’ve learned so far – I’ve learned about the syllabus Despite the move to Java, very little […]

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More on dev-tester relations

Matt Heusser has continued discussion of tester-developer relations, where Jonathan Kohl describes the flipside of testers telling developer’s that their automation code sucks. Actually there are many scenarios, derived from at least a few properties – – Does the person doing the automation know/not know that their code sucks. – Is the code ‘suckage’ pointed […]

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Why (most) agile projects aren't the best you ever work on

Matt Heusser’s recent blog entry on Tester/Developer communications prompted me to comment on the dreams of agile projects and tester heaven. Now, I’ve been tempted to have that conversation, but the conversations I have had instead are much more along these lines: Me: “Hey dev guy, here’s 20 years of accumulated knowledge describing why the […]

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