Welcome to Seapine’s Perspectives on Testing. Every week I’m going to look at articles, blog posts, tweets, and other testing and quality content, and provide some perspective on the news or commentary. Enjoy, and I look forward to hearing your feedback.
Agile Point of View
What an interesting idea! Boost New Media in New Zealand closed its doors for two days to
build a new product for running Agile retrospectives, and then decided to blog about the process. Take a look.
We all know about the specific processes that are associated with Agile methodologies. But what is the true conceptual
heart of Agile? M.J. Jongerius thinks he knows the answer to that question.
Scott Ambler looks at the concept of
Agile architecture, and discusses several “partial misconceptions” surrounding Agile from the architecture point of view.
Testing Philosophy
Is quality dead? James Bach seems to think so, and it’s difficult to disagree with him at this point. He says that we have “ceased to expect that software normally works well, even under normal conditions”. A couple of weeks ago I linked to a post by
Scott Hanselman that had pretty much the same theme. Our lack of quality seems to be more apparent than ever.
Do you get hung up on job titles? Arborosa looks at just what is the
right job title to explain your skills and function to outsiders.
I like logic puzzles. Many people make the mistake of trying to intuit a solution, but if you don’t hurry yourself, often you can sneak up on them from behind. Mike Brown presents a
logic problem for testers that I solved in this fashion.
Lisa Crispin talks about how to set up a
testing lean coffee experiment. While it looks like an intriguing way of getting people from different departments or even companies together to discuss topics of broad interest, I don’t like coffee, so I’m already predisposed to dislike the concept.
Use a “
dump of the World” to get information on a testing failure.
Seapine View
My colleague Jessica Warren blogs about
new articles in the Seapine knowledge base.
Jessica also writes about the many
integrations that Surround SCM and TestTrack have with other products, whether through direct connections or via the SOAP interface.
Testing Events
I’m at the
TestKit conference in Baltimore this week. It’s organized by the
Automated Testing Institute.
I have two New England regional conferences the following week (October 22-27). The first is the
BA*ProjectWorld Summit in Burlington, MA on October 22.
The second is the
Northeast Quality Council Conference, October 23-24 in Mansfield, MA.
Interesting Read
I rarely program any more, mostly because I explain things better than I code them. Yossi Kreinin wonders
why someone wouldn’t want to be a software programmer. Passion grows less over the years, but the easy working environment and good money make programming a lifelong career for many.