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Boffoonery! Comedy Benefit For Bletchley Park. London, Nov 3rd.

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:00:15 -0500

So it's time finally to let the cat out of the blog. I'm producing a comedy benefit gig - with just a tiny bit of help from people who actually know what they're doing - to celebrate the astonishing achievements of those jolly clever men and women who worked in tip-top secret at Bletchley Park to crack the fiendishly fiddly codes being used by the Germans in WWII.

Software Craftsmanship Is Not Rolling Stone

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:00:15 -0500

I like to explain it this way:

Take two music magazines: Rolling Stone and Guitar Techniques.

One is written by people who probably don't play a musical instrument and is aimed at an audience of people who probably don't play a musical instrument either and is mostly not about the actual music itself. Rolling Stone is a magazine about the music business and the musician's lifestyle.

23rd Test Management Forum

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:30:11 -0500

The 23rd Test Management forum will take place on Wednesday 29thJuly at the conference centre at Balls's Brothers, Minster Pavement.

The meeting is sponsored by our patrons: HP, SOGETI and SQS UK

Automation Bias, Documentation Bias, and the Power of Humans

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:00:20 -0500

A few weeks I went down to the U.S. Consulate in Toronto to register Ariel, my daughter, as an American citizen born abroad. (She's a dualie, because she was born in Canada to an American parent: me. I'm a dualie too, born in the U.S. to Canadian parents. Being born a dual citizen is a wonderful example of a best practice. You should follow it. But I digress.)The application process is, naturally, fraught with complication and bureaucracy. There's also a chilling and intimidating level of security; one isn't allowed to bring anything electronic into the Consulate at all. No cell phones, no PDAs, and certainly no laptop computers. That means no electronic records, and no hope of looking anything up. So one has to prepare.

Exploratory Testers' Meetup, June 3

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:30:16 -0500

Thanks to the energetic James Lyndsay, a bunch of us are meeting at the conclusion of his Exploratory Testing class and my Rapid Testing class on Friday, June 3 2009, in London, UK. I expect we'll be there somewhere between 5:30 and 9:00pm. The venue is the Prince Arthur pub, 80-82 Eversholt Street, Euston, London, NW1 1BX, right across the street from Euston Station, north of Euston Road. Three large tables have been reserved. All are welcome; please spread the word!

The “collaboration” pillar (version 1)

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:00:54 -0500

Part of a series on the seven pillars of a good Agile team In the world of software, there are two competing slogans:“Many heads are better than one.”“A committee is the only form of life with many heads and no brain.”In a skilled Agile team, the first slogan wins. It is routine for two [...]

Video on Artisanal Retro-Futurism crossed with Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:30:22 -0500

Earlier this month, I gave a talk at Agile Roots on Artisanal Retro-Futurism crossed with Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism. It was well-received. They’ve now released the video. The talk is about 25 minutes long.

Working with User Stories: The Existing Parts

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 11:20:47 -0500

Let me digress to make a comparison (in the process I may age myself but so be it) - I think back to the time when desktop publishing was first introduced. With desktop publishing draft copies gained a way of looking complete, finalized and picked up an air of authority based solely on the crisp appearance of the material.

I think of user stories in the same way.

I don’t like to review user stories and believe that they are always “right.” I don’t believe that the stories are always “complete.” And I don’t believe user stories can be the authoritative source for anything more than “what the author thought the application would do at the time they wrote the story.” I am a committed skeptic.

Dear parlezuml.com: I'd Like To Work In Computing, But I Have No Technical Skills

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 22:00:46 -0500

Dear parlezuml.com, I have always wanted to start a career in computing because my friends told me that you can earn the kind of money that lawyers and doctors earn but without having to waste years working round the clock and studying to qualify. Unfortunately, I cannot program a computer and don't really know much about IT, and I'm afraid this will be a blocker to my entering the computing profession. What should I do?

CAST Conference Coming Up!

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 18:00:10 -0500
The CAST testing conference is happening in Colorado Springs, July 13-16. I mention this for two reasons:1. I will be teaching a testing tutorial there. I also will be wandering around with my various testing games and challenges hoping to do them with anyone who wants to see what I mean by “testing skills.”2. CAST [...]

XML-RPC Clients In Python and Perl

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:30:15 -0500

I was just writing some XML-RPC code and wanted to post some simple examples of how to talk to an XML-RPC server with some simple client-side code. Here are examples in both Python and Perl.

The examples below show how to connect to an XML-RPC server and call the service's start() method.

a simple XML-RPC client in Python:

#!/usr/bin/env python import xmlrpclib host = 'http://localhost' port = '8888' server = xmlrpclib.Server('%s:%s' % (host, port)) response = server.start() print response

a simple XML-RPC client in Perl (using the Frontier-RPC module):

Google Testing Blog

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:00:32 -0500
By James A. WhittakerLet me be clear that these plague posts are specifically aimed at pointing out problems in testing. I'll get around to the lore and the solutions afterward. But keep up the debate in the comments, that's what this blog is all about.
The plague of repetitiveness
If aimlessness is the result of ‘just doing it’ then repetitiveness is the result of ‘just doing it some more.’ Pass after pass, build after build, sprint after sprint, version after version we test our product. Developers perform reviews, write unit tests and run static analyzers. But we have little insight into this effort and can't take credit for it. Developers test but then we retest. We can’t assume anything about what they did so we retest everything. As our product grows in features and bug fixes get applied, we continue our testing. It isn’t long until new tests become old tests and all of them eventually become stale.

Putting the S in ARxTA

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:30:23 -0500
Artisanal Retro-futurism crossed with Team-scale Anarcho-syndicalism seems a hit. I made upward of 400 stickers, and I have only a handful left. There’s been talk on Twitter about other types of Agile conferences, so let me make a rough proposal for a conference that focuses on solidarity and syndicalism and self-help.There would be four parts [...]

Google Calls for a Joint Effort to Speed Up the Internet

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:00:29 -0500

check out: http://code.google.com/speed/

writeup here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/06/Google-Speed-Up-the-Internet

"Google has launched a web site in an attempt to find ways and push the speed up process of the entire Internet. Google shares research data, web site speed optimization tutorials, recorded presentations on performance, links to lots of performance optimization tools, and a discussion group inviting everyone to share ideas on how to make the web faster."

Pylot is listed in the downloads section!

FitNesse - NarrativeFixture Story 1 nearing completion

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:09:45 -0500

The FitNesse Narratives project that I've been working on along with Andy Palmer, has reached a major milestone - our first story is functionally complete. We're finishing off some refactoring and need to automate the build but once those things are in place our 'Iteration 0' Story will be done.

I thought that you'd like a preview of the NarrativeFixture, the star of this story, so you can start to see where we are going. You'll be able to get your hands on it and use it yourself soon enough.