I've started a new series on my blog... it's a weekly diary of what it's like to work with youDevise as a developer. I thought it might prove interesting to those considering working there in the future... since they are frantically hiring.

You can read the diary on my new blog.

Wondering why I have a new blog?

I met a person working as a test contractor on a project recently who said to me: "There are no requirement documents so therefore I cannot write test scripts. And this means, I cannot test."

I've heard this before from other test contractors. I don't understand the logic being applied.

I tilted my head and was speechless. I thought I should keep listening to see if I could better understand. But I didn't. In this case, it seemed the tester believed the only way to approach testing was to read and review requirements, write test scripts, and then execute test scripts. Since this one approach was not an option in the environment at that time, the tester felt dead-ended with his work.

“Antony” (without the ‘H’) is the anglicised version of Antonius. In victorian times (there or thereabouts I’m guessing), among those wishing to appear oh so intelligent, gossip spread that the spelling of “Antony” was wrong… For, so they would say, it is born of the greek word “anthos” (meaning “flower”) – oh dear… so many poor children with misspelt names…
Despite being completely wrong, the world forgot of my name’s etruscan origin and spelt it with an ‘H’… This misinformation established itself through the eras so much so that, today, the de-facto spelling is “Anthony”. It has even found it’s way into the American pronunciation of the name as: “An-thon-ee”.

Waterfall development has something in common with this story… somehow, through misinformation, what it once was has been warped, into something else.

The key difference is that Waterfall is now increasingly represented as was originally intended. Unfortunately for me, my name is not…

Read the rest of this post on my new blog...

Wondering why I have a new blog?

I’ve decided to move my blog. This is a sad day for me, but my posts have long-since outgrown testingReflections. The content of my blog posts is now about so much more than just testing that it doesn’t seem to make sense hosting it here anymore.

I’m still the curator of testingReflections and intend to continue to be so, as I still get many people telling me how valuable it is to them. I have many plans for it, to bring it up to date but I simply haven’t had the time. I am working hard to make that time, so I appreciate your continued patience.

I finally decided to move my blog from testingReflection to my site to have more control over it. I hope it would be eventually aggregated to testingReflection , but it is not the case right now.

Feature Injection, an approach to Agile Business Analysis created by Chris Matts, is a much misunderstood thing –. It is a way of combining several techniques to understand just enough of a business problem to start expressing solutions to it. It provides specific techniques to incrementally and iteratively comprehend each of the following:

• The business value sought (the why)
• The problem domain (what specifically needs solving to deliver that value)
• The resulting roles, incentives and product capabilities (the solution)

Basically, it helps us to evolve everyone’s understanding of the business-need as we (by other means) also evolve the implementation of the product.

uTest is doing a series of interviews with interesting/well-known testers. I was flattered to be asked to be interviewed recently and found that I enjoyed answering the questions... and didn't hate my answers when I read them as posted (any of you who have ever done that sort of thing know that is a fairly significant statement!)

My interview is "Testing the Limits with Scott Barber": Part I, Part II, Part III