The Latest
Test Automation Grows Up[magazine] Can software test automation ever replace manual software testing? Dion Johnson says no, but he does think it’s time that test automation is recognized as a mature discipline with its own body of knowledge. This ABOK allows test-automation professionals to hone their skills and provides organizations wishing to automate a pool of able resources from which to hire. |
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Tending Communication Paths[magazine] Unfortunately, distrust is common in the relationship between managers and employees. But it doesn’t have to be. Taking the time to keep your communication path “weed free” by finding time for one-on-one communication, being open and honest, and listening to your team members’ input will cultivate an open, honest, and trusting culture within your team. |
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McLuhan for Testers[magazine] If a tester is "somebody who knows that things can be different," then Marshall McLuhan was a tester par excellence. According to McLuhan, the English professor who proposed the Laws of Media, the message of a medium is not its content but rather its effects. Find out how this translates to software testing and how we evaluate requirements. |
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Developing Your Sense of Smell[magazine] With all of the resources available these days—books, blogs, Webcasts, training,—that aid us in our design, are you one of those programmers who lacks the "olfactory gene" needed to detect refactoring odors in your code? Unit testing helps you refine your sense of smell and improve your code design. |
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Four Tips for Technique Seeking[magazine] From an experience with a testing buddy in a large organization, Julie Gardiner had a career-shaping epiphany. She discovered that understanding and applying formal testing techniques can help you grow as a testing professional, and she has incorporated that knowledge into her management repertoire ever since. Learn four ways you can get started using formal testing techniques with your team. |
Julie Gardiner
September 26, 2007 |
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Transform Your Software[magazine] Bring out the best in your code. Systematic code transformations are an important tool for test-driven development. Refactoring and generalization—common code transformations in TDD—improve the code while preserving its behavior and broaden the capabilities of the software. Each technique has its place, and together they help make TDD effective. |
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What's on Your Dashboard?[magazine] Just because a metric is easy to capture doesn't mean it is useful. The metrics that are really needed are the ones that can help you make good decisions. Find out how to establish a project dashboard with meaningful metrics that will guide your project safely to its destination without getting bogged down in an endless pursuit of unnecessary information. |
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Pairwise Testing: An Easy Guide to Orthogonal Arrays & All-Pairs Combinations[magazine] One of the testing challenges we face is how to handle the large numbers of test cases we sometimes need to create and execute. We can't test everything, but pairwise testing using orthogonal arrays or an all-pairs algorithm can help generate pair combinations that reduce the number of test cases we run while still finding a large percentage of bugs. |
Lloyd Roden
September 26, 2007 |
Gartner Mid Size Enterprise 2007 - Live Agile Project - Cyber Korp / Paul Smith[article]
Podcast
In this episode at the Gartner Mid-Size conference, Bob Payne speaks with several folks from Cyber Korp and Paul Smith of ATA Airlines about his experience participating in a Micro Agile Project. |
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Lean-Agile Traceability: Strategies and Solutions[article] For some lean/agile practitioners, the idea of maintaining traceability among different development artifacts is nonsense. There are times, though, when traceability is required and other times when it's highly valuable. We need to develop a value mindset of transparency in our processes and approach so that traceability requirements can be satisfied with minimal effort. |
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Looking Back, Moving Forward: Retrospectives Help Teams Inspect and Adapt[article] Retrospectives are a great way for teams to inspect and adapt their methods and teamwork, and they're a great way for teams to build on success and learn from hard times. Retrospectives take a critical look at what happened during an iteration (or part of a project) without being critical of people. But not everyone realizes that, says Esther Derby, so in this column she outlines how to approach retrospectives in the most productive way. |
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Agile2007 - Segundo Velasquez - Mano a Mano - CodeGreen Labs[article]
Podcast
Segundo Velasquez takes a minute to sit down with Bob Payne to discuss a variety of topics in this informative podcast. Segundo and Bob were both attending Agile 2007 when they took the time to record this great conversation. |
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Behavior-Driven Development: An Evolution in Software Design[article] Behavior Driven Development (BDD) is not a revolution in software design, but rather an evolution in how we software engineers think about program design. In this article the author introduces Behavior-Driven Development, explore the rationale behind it, and introduce Open Source tools—some new, some familiar, that you can use to get you started. |
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Three Levels of Leadership Agility[article] New, in-depth research shows that people move through distinct stages or levels as they become agile leaders. At each new level, managers gain new capacities that make it more natural for them to lead in an agile manner. This article outlines three levels of leadership agility and shows how managers at each level of agility lead projects, lead teams, and engage in pivotal conversations. It ends with a few pointers about ways to assess and develop your own level of leadership agility. |
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Balancing Skills For Agile Team Success[article] Often, our agile teams are made up of junior and senior people. Some of these people tend to be more domain focused, such as understanding financial services, while others are more engineering focused, with expertise in software architecture and programming languages. While this mix is generally beneficial from a synergistic point of view, it can also create friction during development - friction that requires active management attention and a proactive balancing of the relative quot;skills scales.quot; |
John Puopolo
September 12, 2007 |