Category: Systems Thinking
Does cucumber suck?
August 31, 2010
I’ve been having a lot of rants about Cucumber of late, as it’s the new shiny thing for agile teams. Does anyone else have issues with it? I’ve asked all of my programmer friends to convince me of its worth, and they’ve all failed so far. I’ve not seen it adding any value above building […]
The Onion predicts the future once again!
February 4, 2009
The Onion shows off their systems-thinking skills once more. Compare this article on predictive sentence completion with The Onion’s Mac Wheel features at around the one minute mark in the video at http://www.theonion.com/content/video/apple_introduces_revolutionary. Other clairvoyant articles are here and here. Find your own here.
Requirements and specifications: What's the difference and what's it to you?
September 16, 2008
There have been a number of threads I have followed in a few different forums recently where people have discussed requirements, what it means for requirements to be ‘good’, and what it might mean for requirements to be unambiguous. What usually follows is a long-winded back and forth, with no resolution. At the heart of […]
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 […]
What are your users doing (or interview techniques for project analysis)
December 6, 2007
For the first time, I’m helping run planning sessions for an agile project. Planning has been a bit of a bugbear for me on many of my recent projects, so I’m excited to have a chance to try some things out. So far, it seems to be going well. It’s a short project, so I […]
Every tester needs a healthy dose of paranoia
October 3, 2007
I wonder if Google testers think like this? http://www.radaronline.com/from-the-magazine/2007/09/google_fiction_evil_dangerous_surveillance_control_1.php
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 […]
Study session difficulties, or the Learning Organisation challenge
January 17, 2007
In the Yahoo group supporting Cem Kaner’s Black Box Software Testing course, Anil Soni has been describing experiences organising and leading internal training, using the BBST course materials. One point in particular caught my attention: > The major challenge is to have all the testers together in the same time > needed for the group […]
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 […]
Investing for maintenance – Tradeoffs and calculations
January 10, 2007
In the context-driven software testing Yahoo group, there has been an interesting thread on magic numbers. Part of this discussion related to magic numbers for software maintenance investment. While I think you can find plenty of literature that advises a bias towards maintenance, my friend Michael couldn’t find any models that satisfied our burning questions, […]