Making user stories work (by writing use cases instead)
January 17, 2008
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 […]
Rapid testing, risk catalogues and checklists – Windows testing ideas
Many moons ago, when I was a young tester, I worked on the first third party game for Microsoft (Please don’t look for it, it’s terrible). But there was some good to come out of the experience. Windows ’95 was new shiny, and fraught with danger. To help address some of this, I began collecting […]
Farewell 2007…
January 2, 2008
Well, a new year is upon us, and I’d like to thank everyone who has checked in on my blog this year. As a rough guess, my readership has quadrupled or quintupled this year. Google Analytics gives me a nice perspective on this: As a personal highlight, I stuck to the blogging commitment I made […]
Interview on Dr. Dobb's Journal
December 18, 2007
I wask kindly asked to answer five question for the Braidy Tester’s Dr. Dobb’s Journal Testing and Debugging page. It was a nice chance to reflect, and you can read my ramblings here: http://www.ddj.com/blog/debugblog/archives/2007/12/five_questions_41.html Enjoy!
What are your users doing (or interview techniques for project analysis)
December 6, 2007
For the first time, I’m helping run planning sessions for an agile project. Planning has been a bit of a bugbear for me on many of my recent projects, so I’m excited to have a chance to try some things out. So far, it seems to be going well. It’s a short project, so I […]
Web testing security, or Does your website help spammers?
December 4, 2007
Today I was trolling through my Yahoo mails, and noticed that a spam message had made it through to my inbox. I read through my mail, expecting to just delete the spam message when I eventually got to it. When I did, it struck me as unusual. In addition to the message body, there was […]
The essence of goal-driven design
November 11, 2007
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 […]
Passing and failing tests considered harmful
November 8, 2007
Alan Page of Microsoft suggests that there is a perfect world of passed and failed tests, and shades of grey that help us provide more useful information. He then asks “What else do you report as test results (to supplement test case pass/fail counts)? What do those results mean?” Read more at: http://blogs.msdn.com/alanpa/archive/2007/11/07/pass-fail-and-other.aspx I think […]
Context-driven testing course in Melbourne, Sydney
November 6, 2007
If you’re looking for a course different to the usual fare, you might want to check out Rob Sabourin’s “Just in Time” testing course, which will be running in Sydney on the 12th and 13th of November, and in Melbourne on the 15th and 16th (New Zealand after that). I’ve heard good things about his […]
The essence of testing on agile projects
October 24, 2007
‘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 […]