One of the hardest things I find to get people to understand is how to think in small chunks when it comes to breaking up features and stories. One company I was recently talking to is still struggling on defining a release scope. They haven’t gotten the idea of thin slices, delivering small pieces and […]
Blog
The Power of Personas in Exploratory Testing
There are many great articles and books on exploratory testing and I’m not going to try to explain what other people do better. What I do want concentrate on is the power of approaching your exploratory testing from different persona’s point of view. It occurred to me that I haven’t heard people talk much about […]
Programmers as Testers?
There was an interesting and bit controversial thread on the agile testing yahoo group over the last couple of days. Some people thought that all agile testers should have programming skills. Others thought that programmers cannot possibly be good testers because they don’t consider overall quality. It raised a lot of thoughts in my mind, […]
Book Review – Jonathan Rasmusson “The Agile Samurai”
I first met Jonathan about ten years ago when he was a young programmer eager to prove to the world that he was the best he could be. At that time I was impressed with his willingness to be open to new ideas – even the idea that a tester could be valuable on an […]
ATDD vs. BDD vs. Specification by Example vs ….
At Agile 2010, there were about 20 of us at the AA-FTT (Agile Alliance Functional Test Tools) workshop. The emphasis was on “the state of the practice” of Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD). In one of the breakout sessions, we had an interesting discussion on what we actually meant by ATDD, which made me think […]
About Learning 2
We know about how people learn – auditory, visual, kinesthetically. But what about those things we can’t know – like people’s attitude, or how our brain perceives messages. This post comes about because of my reaction to a specific teaching style I experienced lately. Over the years, I have been exposed to ‘learning games’, the […]
About Learning
There have been a number of discussions about certifications lately on some of the on-line groups. People seem to be either ‘for’ or ‘against’ testing certification. I am neither, but I am against advertising certification as a way to teach people how to test. The testing certification programs I am familiar with, only show that […]
Quality – What is it, and what’s the cost?
Last night (Feb 1rsts) at the Scotsman’s pub in Oslo after the XP Meetup, I had an interesting philosophical discussion with Tom Gilb, Geir Amdal and Rune Sørensen. My definition of quality is pretty simple – A product has a sufficient level of quality if it meets or exceeds customer’s expectations. I know it’s pretty […]
Reviews in Agile
A few weeks ago on the agile testing list, a developer in a tester role asked about reviews – Where do they fit in the agile process? Lisa (www.lisacrispin.com) and I didn’t directly answer this concern in our book, so here are my thoughts about this subject. Organizations handle reviews differently, but I like to […]
Resolutions for 2010
Last year was a bit of a blur for me. The book, Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams, that Lisa Crispin and I wrote, far exceeded expectations in sales. The need for courses on the subject also came unexpectedly. I spent the year travelling, giving the course and consulting. It was […]