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

Over the last little while, I’ve been corresponding fairly frequently on the Agile Testing mailing list. You can find it yourself at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/agile-testing. It’s a stimulating, but sometimes frustrating forum. The Agile movement itself (and its most prominent sect, eXtreme Programming, or XP) seem heavily oriented towards developer-centric concerns. That’s fair enough. However, the forum’s mandate confuses me: the charter states that the forum “…is not a group to discuss … Read more

On August 5, 2005, James Bach posted in his blog a really interesting piece on intermittent problems. It’s, as usual, thoughtful and well-considered. You can read it at http://www.satisfice.com/blog/archives/34. It’s a little agonizing to think that an intermittent problem might depend upon achieving a certain threshold value in some variable which might be difficult to reach. One form of intermittent problem might require hundreds of thousands of preceding transactions. This … Read more

Over the last little while, I’ve been corresponding fairly frequently on the Agile Testing mailing list. You can find it yourself at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/agile-testing. It’s a stimulating, but sometimes frustrating forum. The Agile movement itself (and its most prominent sect, eXtreme Programming, or XP) seem heavily oriented towards developer-centric concerns. That’s fair enough. However, the forum’s mandate confuses me: the charter states that the forum “…is not a group to discuss … Read more

Since my January 24 post, I’ve discovered three bugs in UltimateBB. (Well, maybe. Rapid Testing holds two definitions of “bug”: a) “anything that threatens the value of the product” and b) “anything that bugs somebody who matters”. Under definition (a), these qualify as bugs. I reckon I don’t really matter, so under (b), maybe they don’t qualify as bugs. But I digress.) 1) After entering a message (in the arbitrarily … Read more

I get perverse joy in finding bugs on testing and QA-related sites. Here’s one from QAForums. Apparently none of the 106,000 members has noticed the bug, or if they’ve reported it, nothing’s been done. Note that, not only is the “grand_total Quality Assurance Links” tag unknown, but the word “unknown” is spelled wrong.

It occurs to me this evening that when test plans, test scripts, and testers look for particular problems with excessive focus, they do so at the expense of peripheral vision.