Category: Agile
Planning to make use of learning – Incremental vs Iterative
January 25, 2008
During coffee with Agile-coach and all-round excellent guy Shane Clauson, in sympathy with yet another of my what’s-wrong-with-agile rants, he pointed me to this blog post from Jeff Patton: Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it While my opinions diverge on some of what he says must be true, I […]
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 […]
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 […]
MAST Podcast – Agile testing experiences
October 22, 2007
I feel very ‘tech’ now. I’ve uploaded an edited audio version of the last MAST meeting, where we (Erik Petersen, Kristan Vingrys and me) attempt to answer John Gallagher’s questions about testing in agile projects. Find it at http://www.quinert.com/mp3/mast200709a.mp3 Enjoy! The three beeps protect the innocent. The first is a service provider, the second and […]
More on dev-tester relations
June 12, 2007
Matt Heusser has continued discussion of tester-developer relations, where Jonathan Kohl describes the flipside of testers telling developer’s that their automation code sucks. Actually there are many scenarios, derived from at least a few properties – – Does the person doing the automation know/not know that their code sucks. – Is the code ‘suckage’ pointed […]
Why (most) agile projects aren't the best you ever work on
May 27, 2007
Matt Heusser’s recent blog entry on Tester/Developer communications prompted me to comment on the dreams of agile projects and tester heaven. Now, I’ve been tempted to have that conversation, but the conversations I have had instead are much more along these lines: Me: “Hey dev guy, here’s 20 years of accumulated knowledge describing why the […]
What's in a name?
April 24, 2007
There seems to be a flurry of post-agile activity on blogs right now. If you haven’t noticed, you can look at an example here. There is more elsewhere, and Jonathan Kohl tells me there is more coming. What this amounts to is a growing number of people who, for a variety of reasons, have a […]
Models of software development
January 16, 2007
After an email exchange with Matt Heusser, Matt has posted my comments on how our work tools sometimes influence our behaviour on projects. That’s because these work tools are based on models of how someone believe software should be developed. Perhaps more importantly, the tools that I’ve seen are usually designed to ensure that the […]
Personas, substruction and other trades’ tricks
July 30, 2006
Developing personas is a well-described technique (see Alan Cooper’s ‘The Inmates are Running the Asylum’ and Mike Cohn’s ‘User Stories Applied’) for considering the different kinds of users of the system we are developing. On a recent project, we began considering the different users who might want to user our product. In the process, I […]
Sure, it's a developer's world, but still?
March 14, 2006
One more word on XP as methodology (well, a few more actually). Any methodology seems to me to be a snapshot of a solution to a particular problem that somebody solved at some point, with a particular set of people and skills in a specific context. There are occasional statements flying around the agile-testing group […]