Category: Teamwork

Requirements and specifications: What's the difference and what's it to you?

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 […]

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Software testing, art and productivity

In the Yahoo software-testing list, Shrini Kulkarni stated “…productvity as a term is “bad” for creative work like “testing” or “art”. That makes me to feel that I am a low skilled labour on a manufacturing assembly line (not that – it is a bad profession but that does not represent the kind of job […]

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Passing and failing tests considered harmful

Alan Page of Microsoft suggests that there is a perfect world of passed and failed tests, and shades of grey that help us provide more useful information. He then asks “What else do you report as test results (to supplement test case pass/fail counts)? What do those results mean?” Read more at: http://blogs.msdn.com/alanpa/archive/2007/11/07/pass-fail-and-other.aspx I think […]

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The essence of testing on agile projects

‘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 […]

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Personal growth and fertilisers (or fertilizers)

Today, I’m translating the Korean children’s story ‘puppy poo’ for my blog. It turns out that somebody has already translated it, so it’s not the world-first I thought it was going to be. Oh well. I needed the Korean practice anyway. It’s a touching children’s story, about a piece of poo who finds meaning and […]

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Project Manifestos

Having worked on the trial project mentioned in Michael Ruschena’s recent blog entry on Project Manifestos, I can say it’s well worth trying out. And when I say ‘trying out’, I mean having the conversations and going through the thought processes required to figure out how you might work together as a team. I find […]

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Why I call myself a tester

I’ve been sadly busy, finishing a cool project with much learning, and preparing to leave my current employer Revolution IT for Aegeon. This means I get to have another crack at building an army of testing ninjas and sending them out into the world to hopefully make it a better place. Hopefully, that means less […]

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More on dev-tester relations

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 […]

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Why (most) agile projects aren't the best you ever work on

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 […]

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