Agile coding, agile testing, agile coaching, the agile enterprise, and Network Weaving.
[Part of a series of posts on Java Selenium RC patterns I find useful.] What we Want: Expressive, Succinct Tests Let’s say I want to test that I can log into an app. I want my Selenium RC Java test code to look something like this, because I want it to read, aloud, the way [...]
Long Live Storytests, Dang Blast It The recent claims made by a well-known agile coaching thoughtleader notwithstanding, I work hard to get clients to adopt real Storytesting practices, with real Storytesting tools (FitNesse is still my tool of choice; I work mostly with Java teams). I will continue to do so. I find no false economy [...]
Balancing a Classic Software Duality In the West, we are very dual. Our opposites tend not to touch or integrate, much less balance. The true, intertwined and balanced nature of duality comes more easily to Eastern cultures than to us. Opposites naturally include and oppose each other in the East. Yin includes some Yang, and [...]
Background By way of even more background, my original post on this topic is here. Patterns are Emerging In response to several comments and conversations with people in the industry, several of us, most recently Chris Beale, Gary Baker, John Huston, and Daryl Kulak, have been converging on a definition of this new role, this new [...]
The Old Atomic Unit of Production: the Project I came up in a software industry in which the atomic unit of production capacity was The Programmer. Programmers were largely assigned, as needed, to ephemeral entities called Projects. Yes, it had a Taylorist mechanistic undertone, and often still does. Cut to scene: The Project Manager whisks into [...]
My pal Abby Fichtner, the HackerChick, blogged today about emerging agile team leadership patterns and practices, as had been reinforced for her by a recent presentation by David Spann. She lists beliefs and behaviors that, according to Spann, when held by whomever actually manages an agile team, tend to help or tend to hurt. These resonated [...]
In my rank procedural coding days, I might have written through-the-web-app-GUI test code that looks like this (we’re using TestNG here, though at first it may look like Junit 4): @Test public void canCreateRightTriangle() throws Exception { //selenium setup SeleniumServer jettyProxy = new SeleniumServer(); jettyProxy.start(); DefaultSelenium selenium = new DefaultSelenium("localhost", 4444, "*firefox", "http://www.google.com"); selenium.start(); selenium.setSpeed("0"); [...]
Premise: No, Software Dev Ain’t Like Manufacturing So it’s pretty old news that software development is not manufacturing. The reason many of us have questioned manufacturing metaphors is that software development involves inherently much more variation. Compared to a factory line for a sports car, building the average corporate CRUD web application (not to mention [...]
Simple “Clean Code” Metrics for C-Level Execs A recent Twitter thread I was involved in goes something like this. Someone claimed that software managers and executives should not have to care whether their developers are test-driving Clean Code. They should be able to presume that their developers are always courageous, disciplined, and skillful enough to [...]
Background: Scrummerfall Brad Wilson and others have blogged about a persistent “scrummerfall” pattern in agile transformations wherein, despite good-faith efforts on the part of teams to blast away cube walls, silos, and artificial role divisions, we still have programmers and testers working in phases. I’ve seen this repeatedly myself. Each little iteration is (at best) a [...]