There was much rejoicing on Twitter this afternoon over a blog posting. Apparently, IMVU is rolling out fifty deployments each and every day, and they’re doing so by the magic of Continuous Deployment. “The high level of our process is dead simple: Continuously integrate (commit early and often). On commit automatically run all tests. If the tests pass deploy to the cluster. If the deploy succeeds, repeat.“ Some more details: … Read more
Conversation, whether in person or online, is one of those marvelously unpredictable things. Real conversation a fundamentally exploratory activity. When assisted by a good encyclopedia, dictionary, or reference library—or the Web, it’s even more fun. Good conversation, like good exploration, takes us to interesting places. Tonight, Ben Simo and I were griping to each other, in Skype, about Skype’s horrid new chat window. My complaint was the way in which … Read more
I’ll be giving a keynote presentation at STAR East this year: What Haven’t You Noticed Lately: Building Awareness in Testers. (Credit where credit is due: The title is strongly influenced by Mark Federman and his work, and comes from a now-rare book by Terence Gordon about Marshall McLuhan called McLuhan for Beginners. It’s not clear from Gordon’s book whether “What Haven’t You Noticed Lately” is McLuhan’s quote or something that … Read more
A blogger on TestRepublic asks “How can a trainee improve his/her skill sets in testing?” This is what I do. I recommend it to all trainees (or “freshers”, as they say in India). Find something that interests you, or something that would be useful to you or to a client, or something that you must do, or a problem that you need to solve, or something that you think might … Read more
In the Agile-Testing list, Kevin Lawrence says “I share in the fantasy that my business people will write tests and am jealous of those who have turned fantasy into reality but, alas, I have not shared that experience.“ Wanting business people to write tests, to me, feels like a cook wanting the restaurant’s patrons to sauté their own mushrooms. Dear Madam Business Person, I don’t want to stop you writing … Read more
“Quality is value to some person.” —Jerry Weinberg In the agile-testing mailing list, Steven Gordon says “The reality is that meeting the actual needs of the market beats quality (which is why we observe so many low quality systems surviving in the wild). Get over it. Just focus on how to attain the most quality we can while still delivering fast enough to discover, evolve and implement the right requirements … Read more
Arianna Huffington, on the Daily Show, suggested that one point of the blog was to work out nascent ideas without being overly concerned about completeness. There are a bunch of things that are rattling around at the moment, from all kinds of different sources. One is The Sciences of the Artificial, by Herbert Simon—a book that James Bach has been recommending to me practically forever. I’m finally getting around to … Read more
With apologies to James Taylor, I’m going to Carolina, and not merely in my mind. The Triangle Information Systems Quality Association (TISQA) will present Agile Testing In The Carolinas, March 16th and 17th, 2009, at The Friday Center, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The first day is a day of keynotes, conference sessions, and networking; the second is dedicated to half- and full-day workshops. Featured speakers include Shaun Bradshaw, T.R. Buskirk, … Read more
Over the years, I can remember working with exactly one organization that used my idea of an excellent approach to software engineering metrics. Their approach was based on several points: In summary, they viewed metrics in the same kind of way as excellent testers view testing: with skepticism (that is, not rejecting belief but rejecting certainty), with open-mindedness, and with awareness of the capacity to be fooled. Their metrics were … Read more
For the last five years or so, I’ve been living with my wife, Mary Alton, a talented artist and interface designer. And for the last six years or so, we’ve been waiting for a time when we were both free to start updating the look, feel, and content of my increasingly antique- and clunky-looking Web site (either she’s had too much work with paying clients, or I have… and then … Read more