Ron Jeffries and I, among others, have been discussing our contrasting approaches to testing in the Agile Testing mailing list. We’ve been doing this for about five years now, and we’re not getting very far. Recently a colleague suggested that most arguments seem to be about conclusions, when in fact they’re about premises. I believe that Ron and I are working from dramatically different premises about what a test is, … Read more
Randall Schwartz provides a review of Damian Conway’s book, Perl Best Practices. If we’re lucky, you can still read the review here. I like Randall Schwartz’s stuff in general. His books on Perl are pretty readable and engaging, and they’ve helped me a ton, to the point where I can actually cobble together some useful Perl code every now and then. Damian’s book isn’t important here. I haven’t read it, … Read more
A couple of months ago, a correspondent on the Agile Testing list asked a bunch of questions, some of which I answered in an earlier blog post. Here are the answers to the other questions. 4) How do we estimate Test Efforts for agile Testing? Can we use normal estimation models? I’m going to differentiate here between agile testing and Rapid Testing–the kind of testing defined by James Bach, the … Read more
A fellow today told me that, as part of his company’s quality program, the people in his department have to fill out a survey at the end of every project. The survey is on the order of 50 questions long. The answers are in multiple-choice format, so there’s a chance that one could garner some data from it, but relatively little information. I asked him if they had considered modifying … Read more
A correspondent on the Agile Testing mailing list asks a series of questions. My answer is personal, and may or may not be shared by people on the list. I don’t want to get into a huge debate in that forum, and since the question comes up a lot anyway, I thought I would answer it and invite comment here. 1) Can we use Agile testing for Non Agile projects? … Read more
I spent the last couple of days of January and the first few days of February attending two workshops hosted by Cem Kaner and James Bach in Melbourne, Florida. The first was the Exploratory Testing Research Summit, attended by James Bach Jonathan Bach Scott Barber Michael Bolton Elisabeth Hendrickson Cem Kaner Mike Kelly Jonathan Kohl James Lyndsay Robert Sabourin As I expected, it was a very rich and useful discussion. … Read more
A little while hacking away at CSS, and there’s a new style for the blog. Hope you like it.
Jonathan Kohl and I were chatting recently as we often do. (Chatting with Jonathan is so interesting and enjoyable and productive that it sometimes has a serious impact on other forms of productivity.) We’re observing together the evolution of agile development, in terms of what I’m proposing to call “mythodology“. (I invented this term independently, and was sorry to see via a Google search that I wasn’t the first person … Read more
Some time in December 2006, I asked Scott Ambler if he would provide us with a presentation at TASSQ, the Toronto Association of System and Software Quality (I’m the program chair for that organization). I was delighted that he agreed to present. I was aware that his remarks would probably be controversial, and that I would agree with some of them and disagree strongly with others. Scott gave his talk … Read more
The site to which this post refers no longer exists. So it goes. Bits thou art and until bits shalt thou return. The DSDM is YADM (Yet Another Development Methodology). On its Web site, the consortium which promotes it says “It was out of this recognition in the market place for an Industry Standard RAD Framework that the DSDM (Dynamic Systems Development Method) Consortium was born.” Well, recognition of the … Read more