Antony Marcano's blog

FitNesse ships with dotnet 1.1... still??!!

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 06:26:47 -0500

Firstly, my thanks to Gojko Adzic for giving such a rapid response on the FitNesse mailing list to help me solve the problem I encountered getting my .NET assemblies loaded in FitNesse .NET...

After at least 2 years of doing absolutely no .NET work, I started working with a .NET team this week, helping them to use FitNesse.

Trying to run my test for the first time, the FitServer.exe just wasn't finding my assembly... HelloFitNesse.dll

Free evening talk: Understanding Qa/Testing On Agile Projects

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:07:37 -0500

I'll be giving a free evening public talk in Clerkenwell, London for SkillsMatter on 8th September at 18:30pm. The talk is applicable to anyone on an agile team or running agile projects...

Testing is an integral and prominent aspect of agile development, however, new teams form and existing teams prevail with uncertainty about how testers fit into the process. Even those projects that don’t have testers dedicated to them can still feel there is a void in how they ensure that they are building the right product and building the product right.

Tester-developer/developer-tester... transitional like ye-olde analyst-programmer

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 07:56:06 -0500

Cross-functional teams are growing in popularity, influenced in no small part by the growth in adoption of agile values and the methodologies that support them.

Whether it's a side effect of getting developers and testers working more closely or due to the undulating skills demands from iteration to iteration, each team-member is increasingly expected to have more diverse skills. Furthermore, Test Driven Development increases the need for developers to know more about testing; automated acceptance tests as part of Acceptance Test Driven Development written in the same language as the product increases the need for testers to know about programming.

public class TeamMember implements ITestSoftware, IWriteCode, IDevelopProducts... and a special forces twist...

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 19:24:52 -0500

No, this isn't on the same topic as my previous post on Udi Dahan's interface naming style. But, I have taken inspiration from it as I've been trying to find a way to communicate a people issue.

In that post, I was illustrating a point that Udi had made about naming interfaces not based on what they are but what they do... based on their roles...

ISubmitBlogPosts - a nice twist on Apps Hungarian Notation for Interfaces...

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 09:04:37 -0500

I've been pairing with Andy Palmer over this last week. I have to say it's been a lot of fun... and I think we've learned a lot from the experience. One of the things I learned from Andy this week was an innovative use of Hungarian notation for interfaces... Andy told me about Udi Dahan's presentation on intentions and interfaces (PDF)

The Telephone Game...

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 05:03:53 -0500

In an earlier post, I mentioned Boehm's distinction between 'verification' and 'validation':

Verification - Am I building the product RIGHT?

Validation - Am I building the RIGHT product?

-Boehm, Software Engineering Economics

As I was writing an article to appear in the October 2008 issue of Better Software Magazine I arrived at a better way of getting my point across...

A test is "an example of the rule in practice", but...

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:23:49 -0500

In Jason Gorman's post called Tests Are Instances Of Rules he says:

In test-driven development, we use tests as executable specifications of what is required of the software we create.

For this to work effectively, our tests have to convey the underlying intent. And this requires us to ponder the relationship between a test and a specification.

How nice it is to see...

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 07:02:54 -0500

I can't tell you how satisfying it is to see the fruits of my labours! I had a particularly proud moment when I read 32 Burndowns by Rob Hardy on the BBCi Labs blog... The rich collection of example burn-downs tell 32 different stories... and Rob's summary of how these projects work is dramatically different to the one he might have told only 2 years ago... but for me the gratifying aspect of this is seeing the ongoing growth in their development and understanding of what they do, how they do it and why they do it that way...

QA/Testing (Again)

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 13:21:55 -0500

Software is about the only industry that lumps testing and QA under one banner. It's one of those things where common misuse of a term results in the community changing it's meaning... this happens in mainstream language all the time.

Testing something is actually more analogous to quality control or, QC. QA is more concerned with the process - collecting information about the performance of the process in order to determine if we are 'assuring' (or more realistically increasing the probability of) quality. Statistical information about problems found in the product (during quality control) is just one of many pieces of info useful to someone concerned with QA (which really should be the whole project team)

Hitting the nail on the head...

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 05:06:20 -0500

For a while, I've been trying to describe how I work... how I coach teams... Or at least how I have been for a while now anyway. I've said things like "I focus on values not practices" or "I help people understand what they want to achieve then help them find ways to achieve it"... or "I help teams ask questions of themselves that, with the benefit of hindsight, I would have asked myself". However, after reading Jason Gorman's post I realised that, completely by accident, I was doing much the same thing. Jason says:

Instead, I finally admitted that my real job is to persuade people that they want to learn. And not in any bulls**t manipulative way. I've focused the largest part of my effort on being a catalyst to help recharge people's interest and passion for what they're doing.

STAREast Interview now available as a Podcast...

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 09:19:18 -0500

For anyone interested, I was interviewed after giving my "Behind every bug is a story" tutorial at STAREast. This interview is now available online.

Joey McAllister speaks with Antony Marcano about his STAREAST tutorial, "Behind Every Bug is a Story," as well as some of the other conference sessions that Antony attended and enjoyed.

QA & Testing... aren't they the same?

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 08:21:15 -0500

The short answer is "no".

Several people have found my explanation of it useful so I'm sharing it here...

The QA metaphor in software development has come from other, arguably, more mature industries - such as medicine, manufacturing, construction and so on. It is about all the things that we do to increase the probability of building in quality - not just detecting when we've failed to build in quality as is the case with much software testing. In this regard, testing is more analogous to quality control or, QC.

In simple terms:
QC helps us answer the question 'does our product work?'
QA helps us answer the question 'does our process work?'

Unfortunately, many teams don't realise their process doesn't work until the testers find all the ways in which the product doesn't work... maybe that's why software testing has come to be known as QA.?

If only software development was like listening to internet radio...

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 12:46:28 -0500

It's true - people who don't get TDD hear the word 'Test' and all but ignore the 'Driven Development' part of it... sometimes to the point that they assume "oh, that's that testers job then"... or the opposite happens when you hear "doesn't that mean developers spend time testing when they should be writing code?"... It can take long and hard to break through this initial cultural barrier... For a long time I've searched for a way other than dropping the word 'T' in 'TDD' to break through the inevitable barrier and I'd almost given up hope... to the point where I was about to resort to the BDD philosophy. The benefits of test-infection made me persist.

To try to get people to understand the 'Driven Development' aspect of writing customer tests first a.k.a. "Acceptance Test Driven Development" (ATDD) and the relevance of the test and testing and testers and let's not forget early and frequent customer feedback... I've been using a different approach. It doesn't solve all of the problems caused by the letter 'T' but it does solve one of them - the part where people ignore the fact that the tests are driving development (yes I said 'tests' not 'testers' - I emphasise this because someone recently asked me 'so, how exactly do the testers drive the developers?').

So... let's talk about something else for a second... I want you to stop thinking about testing... for one moment. I want you to forget about the word 'test' and all the connotations that go along with it... I want you to think about something else... something random... let's say... 'Internet Radio'...

Hackontest - 24 hour opensource programming competition

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 17:14:18 -0500

I'm not sure why it is called hackontest, nor am I sure why the definition of 'hacker' used on their website highlights the 'clever programmer' aspect of its origins but ignores the 'learning programming by trial and error' (i.e. not necessarily knowing about designing for maintainability and other such things)...

But, they have a goal to advance one or more open source tools by having a day dedicated to adding new features to open source tools...

The Swiss Open Systems User Group /ch/open organizes the first international Hackontest sponsored by Google as part of informatica08, the Swiss year of computer science 2008. Hackontest is a 24-hour programming competition of three teams of different open source projects. Its goals are to enhance popular Free Software projects according to user needs and to demonstrate to the public how enthusiastically open source software is being developed.

Interested in proposing a project? Interested in voting for features? Interested in competing for the USD 8500 prize?

Well - if you are, check out the Hackontest website for more info...

See you at XTC

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 06:04:13 -0500

Tomorrow (Tuesday 15th April 2008), I'll be at Extreme Tuesdays Club at the Counting House.

If you want to chat about testing on Agile projects, Test Driven Development or just like beer and pie then do come along.