As some of you may recall, a couple of years ago I ran a workshop on Agile Performance testing.

You can find out more about this by searching for WOPR7.

The general theme, with the exception of one experience report, focused on post-hoc performance testing. A lot of work has been done over the last decade to advance functional test-driven development. When I say 'functional' I don't mean 'application level tests' (a.k.a. acceptance tests); I mean tests at the level of unit, acceptance and every level in between where these tests are concerned with functional behaviours (of the unit or the application respectively).

The testing tool Selenium goes from strength to strength. As evidenced at the recent Selenium Users Meeting, the future plans for Selenium look really interesting and Google seem to want to continue to invest heavily in Selenium which can only mean good things for the rest of us. Testers have learned to use abstraction [...]

I’ve made a lot of mistakes over the years when testing. I try not to make each mistake more than once - which usually means any future mistakes require more creativity or stupidity on my part. So I will describe some of the mistakes I (and other people I have known) have made when doing [...]

I don’t really watch a lot of TV. I spend far too much time in front of the computer. But sometimes I like to have something off the side of my vision on my 2nd monitor and in the past I would have probably played a DVD of an old TV show, but lately I [...]

Previously I described how I made some TDD mistakes and fixed them by tracking them. And now to help me maintain my good behaviour and reduce my recidivism rate, I install some eclipse plugins: Emma, FindBugs, PMD and mousefeed.

For the longest time I didn’t know what dependency injection meant - anytime I looked it up I glazed over thinking it really complicated.I only recently found out while learning TDD that I can describe dependency injection in terms of - pass an object in as a parameter instead of instantiating it in the class [...]

This can hardly form a particularly useful book review since “TQM - The Quality Makers” now resides in the ‘out of print’ category, but dedicated hunters of quality books can find 2nd hand copies. So the question becomes - should you bother?[amazon.com][amazon.co.uk]

Every so often there will appear a strange symmetry to the books and articles that I read. One such parallel which I found when reading Jo Owen and Joseph Campbell on the same day appears below.I have encountered many other quotes which cover a very similar ground - but since both of these appeared at [...]

285 pages to tell me the ‘one’ thing I need to know? Obviously Marcus plans to tell me a little more than one thing. But the basic message behind this book seems to be “there are a few things good managers/leaders do, which prevent them from failing. But there is One thing that the [...]

In a previous post I discussed how I managed to do UAT badly in the past. Now I will discuss a generalised model formed from those (and other) experiences, which should allow me to make fewer UAT mistakes in the future.

I love pulp novels. Particularly the hero pulps - The Shadow, Doc Savage and The Spider. So when I saw “The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril” on the bookshop shelf with its distressed cover and the sadly slightly camp depiction of Lester Dent (on the UK cover). I had to buy it. [amazon.com][amazon.co.uk]Although we don’t [...]

Gnuplot is a free cross-platform program for scientific plotting, but is also useful for generating all sorts of other graphs.

There are lots of tutorials showing how to use Gnuplot in interactive mode.  However, Gnuplot can also be scripted from the command line for generating static images of graphs/plots.  I usually need to graph performance data, consisting of X,Y data points.  Gnuplot allows me to do this easily by passing a config file to the Gnuplot program in non-interactive mode.

I haven't posted much about my enjoyment of motorcycles, but yesterday I took the next step in my ongoing series of motorcycle experiences.