Alternative topic: Specification Review tips

My latest column...

Drive-by training. Never heard of it? It is exactly what it sounds like. You drive to a training facility (or an instructor drives to you), for a day or three the instructor delivers the pre-packaged training class, then everyone drives back home. It's not the best training model ever invented. There is generally no student assessment, and the only instructor/course provider accountability is reputation. Even so, many good ideas can be shared and lots of students come away feeling that it was well worth "the drive."

As it turns out, I've been delivering a lot of drive-by training to software testers this fall. That in itself isn't particularly noteworthy -- end-of-the-budget year is a popular time for drive-by training -- but something that is noteworthy is that I have noticed a rise in some disturbing behaviors among the individuals and organizations that select and attend drive-by training.

At first, I thought it was just me. But after an informal poll (and some lively discussions) with my employees and trainer friends in the testing realm, I became increasingly convinced that the behaviors I'm noticing are not exclusive to me and that I'm not the only one who thinks they are on the rise.

Read the rest of the column.

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Scott Barber

President & Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.

Executive Director, Association for Software Testing

Co-Author, Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications

 

"If you can see it in your mind...

     you will find it in your life."

Lawrence Winkler has two libraries. One is a traditional one, a library of information with new books and some more than 100 years old. The other library is now just a library of data, which was 3 books he had paid $100 for. What happened? Technological upgrades have degraded his books into unintelligible digital goobledegook. Now he is trying to highlight the dangers of storing information only in a digital form. In May, he had the 69th comment on a post about ebooks and copyright. In October, he had the 10th comment on a post about Amazon pushing their e-book device.

The German media branded them “Germany’s dumbest bankers” but two Board members and a senior risk controller of the state owned KfW Bank were suspended then sacked two weeks later. They were blamed for a transfer of 350 million euros to the US Lehman Brothers, 2 hours before Lehman’s declared bankruptcy despite saturation media reporting of Lehman’s troubles.

My latest column...

During a coffee break at a class the other week, I overheard the following comment from one student to another:

Tester: "This stinks! All of my automated test scripts are broken and I can't seem to get the tool to work now that the developers have enabled Secure Sockets Layer. I'm going to have to work through the weekend."

I know that it's generally considered rude to eavesdrop, and ruder still to comment on a conversation you weren't invited to, but I figured that since I was teaching the class I'd be forgiven. Besides, I simply couldn't help myself.

Read the rest of the column.

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Scott Barber

President & Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.

Executive Director, Association for Software Testing

Co-Author, Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications

 

"If you can see it in your mind...

     you will find it in your life."

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.

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...