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
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