In the late 1970s, in the Co-Evolution Quarterly, the magazine successor to The Whole Earth Catalog, Peter Warshall stated that geodesic dome houses always leak. This was a bold and surprising statement at the time, coming from a man who was considered one of the finest builders of dome houses–ones that didn’t leak.
Why did he make this statement? (Continued)
Jim Shore has posted a response to the reactions about his previous post on Acceptance Testing in which he defends the way he and the teams he coaches are working. About the same time, Lisa Crispin posted her thoughts on the topic.
As Lisa says,
I can’t tell you the one right way to test and develop software…. The one right way for your team to code and test will continually evolve over the years. In fact, I’m sorry to tell you that you’ll never find the one right way; it’s a moving target, but you’ll get closer and closer to it.
This is an incredibly important point! There may be many “wrong” ways—wrong in that they fail to achieve your objectives—but there is no “right way.” So I’m happy that Jim and his teams are able to achieve the results they want. I’m not saying they’re doing it wrong. (Continued)
Recently, Jim Shore wrote about The Problems With Acceptance Testing. I like Jim, and respect him a lot. Because of my respect for his opinions, I found it quite discouraging that he said, “I no longer use [automated acceptance testing] or recommend it.” Gojko Adzic has posted his response to Jim. This is mine.
Certainly when something’s not giving you the results you want, it’s time to make a change. That change can be to drop the practice that’s not working for you. It can also be changing the way you go about the practice, or changing what you want to accomplish. Or, instead of changing, maybe the word “refining” is a better fit. (Continued)
Yesterday was a day of mistakes. Not so much making mistakes, but talking about them. It started with Bret Pettichord’s tweet
Agile requires the courage to make mistakes in front of others and the maturity to admit them when they happen.
There were a couple dozen people who showed up at the Fool, last night, for my presentation on A ”Lingua Franca” to Ensure You Get the Right System. I’d like to thank them all for coming and for such lively participation.
These are exciting times. The tools of acceptance testing and behavior-driven development are progressing beyond the domain of the techies. They are entering the realm where they can help the Whole Team. (Continued)
Maybe you’re starting your first Agile project. You’ve read books and blogs. You’ve had training. You think you’re ready, but it’s still a daunting prospect. There’s just so much to remember—so many details.
Here’s a little cheat sheet. Forget all the details and the various ways you can implement Agile for the moment. Let’s simplify the picture. There are just three essential legs that your Agile project needs to stand. Get those in place, and you’ll do OK. Keep improving all three, and you’ll do fantastically! (Continued)
It’s a very common complaint, such as this one left on the Scrumdevelopment yahoogroup:
Usually in different phases, workload for tester and dev is different. E.g. when a project is coming to the end, most of the tasks will be test.
There are a couple of big red flags waving at me in those two sentences. One is “different phases.” Why should a software development project, especially one only a couple weeks to a couple months long, have phases? The other is, at “the end, most of the tasks will be test.” Postponing testing to a phase at the end has never worked very well. It always results in the testers being behind at the end.
Does this situation sound somewhat familiar to you? If so, what can we do about it?
Much of the time, the test-driven development yahoogroup is pretty quiet, but it has recently awakened from winter hibernation. The question “Is it OK to add code to a class only to improve its testability?” stirred up a wide-ranging discussion that brought in the topic of what constitutes good design. “Uncle Bob” Martin drew a bold line in the sand with his comment,
One reasonable definition of good design is testability. It is hard to imagine a software system that is both testable and poorly designed. It is also hard to imagine a software system that is well designed but also untestable.
I greatly sympathize with this statement, though I wouldn’t go quite that far. I don’t think it is so hard to imagine code that is testable, but poorly designed. For a trivial counter-case, there could be rampant duplication of testable code. I would call that poorly designed, but it doesn’t affect it’s testability. Therefore I would soften Uncle Bob’s definition to “One reasonable component of the definition of good design is testability.”
To me, the notion of “testable code” is the same thing that “testable circuit” was back when I worked on a custom integrated circuit. Mostly, that depends on the ability to put the circuit or code into a known state, exercise it, and see the interactions with its collaborators and its resulting state. (Continued)
Yves Hanoulle asks, “If you could change 1 thing today what would it be?” as the first question in his Agile Retroflection of the Day project. Today being the first of the year, it’s natural that I look back over the past year as I consider this question. And so I answer,
That people could ask for, and could accept, the help they need and want. (Continued)
The world is slowly recovering from a major financial meltdown. People blame the collapse on a number of different things: a bubble of inflated housing prices, relaxed requirements for qualifying for a mortgage, predatory lending practices, greed on the part of mortgage companies and investment banks…. There are certainly many places to point fingers. Each of these places, however, was doing what seemed logical when looking at a small piece of the puzzle.
As is often the case, we must back up and take a larger systemic view to see further. Once upon a time, people borrowed money to buy a house, paid it back over time, and ultimately the bank was able to lend that money to someone else. With the creation of the FNMA (Fannie Mae) in 1938, the income streams of those mortgages being repaid were converted to bonds, so that they could be sold to other investors and the banks to re-lend their money more frequently. This allowed many more people to afford houses. In the 1970s, private banks got into the business of creating their own bonds based on debt repayment streams.
Nothing ever stands still, of course. People continued to look for new wrinkles on these themes to allow them to expand the business, or to increase the profit on the business they had. Some of these investment vehicles got very complicated, intended only for professional bankers who could understand and evaluate them where the mass public could not. Or, so went the pitch at the time. (Continued)