December 2007
Business Software is Ugly →
Recently Uncle Bob talked about a manager who constantly choose short term hacking over anything else defending the decision with the idea that “business software is ugly.” Uncle Bob came up with a good argument to make:
One of the developers asked the question point blank: “What do you do when your managers tell you to make a mess?” I responded: “You don’t take it. Behave like a doctor who’s...
Technical Debt - VI →
After a brief hiatus, I would like to return to the subject of technical debt. First off, I don’t think technical debt is a question of “Yes or No”, but instead a question of “How Much.” After all, everyone loves the company where the boss gives them all the time they need to implement the “right” solution without any pressure … right until it goes...
Stub your worries away →
I recently came across this question on the testdrivendevelopment Yahoo! group.
Hi everyone, I’d like some advice/opinions on how to test some existing code. It’s a web
application using Spring and struts. I have a class called the ProcessedFilesManager which contains a number of
methods used by Struts Action classes. This manager communicates with five
different DAOs to get the information that...
Interested in what interests me? →
I’m starting to tag more stuff with del.icio.us, so if you think you might find interesting what I find interesting, then add http://del.icio.us/rss/jbrains762 to your favorite RSS feed reader.
Why are companies slow to adopt metrics programs? →
Another in the series of videos from Enerjy in which my fellow conference speakers and I answered the question, “Why are companies slow to adopt metrics programs?”
Is Bugzilla dying? →
Max
has some interesting points about the long ago chosen language choice for the
bug tracking tool Bugzilla: Perl.
What is the popular Bugzilla’s future, due to the limitations of the Perl? It sounds
like they are thinking about a rewrite. Can an open source product survive a transition
of that magnitude? This will be interesting to see how it pans out. Open
source failed me once, I hope...
Links for 2007-12-28 [del.icio.us] →
Twitter: Vulnerable to Spammer Invasion?
Lighting Talks Web Page Up - →
I am now officially in recruiting mode for lightning talks to ST&PCon, and have added a web page about lightning talks - here.
User-Agent Information and Tools →
I’ve decided to dedicate a spot on the blog for the user-agent information I’ve been
providing over the last few years. From now on you can reference this post from the
right navigation under the tools section.
Here are four very good lists and classifications of user-agents:
...
Twitter: Vulnerable to Spammer Invasion? →
Which agile practice most benefits programmers? →
Thanks to Richard Sharpe for interviewing me at Agile Development Practices Conference 2007 in Orlando, Florida. This is the first in a series of short videos about agile software practice.
A simple question; I'd like your response →
document.write('');
"Agile People Still Don't Get It"? →
I ran across Cédric Beust’s article Agile People Still Don’t Get It again, and I just wanted to point one little thing out for you, for him, for everyone. He writes about a presentation he attended that illustrated why agile people still don’t get it: One of the first slides that deeply troubled me claimed the following: Tests are (executable) specs; (and) If it’s not testable, it’s useless. ...
Netscape Navigator is dead →
After
a near 14 year life span competing with IE and other better browsers, AOL is
throwing in the towel on Netscape
Navigator. The war was long and drawn out but has finally come to an end for the
poor browser.
Sweet! Take another browser off the browser compatibility testing list.
Read more here…
Want to download a few keepsakes or take a walk down memory lane? Check out...
How Can I Become a Better Tester? Part II: Read →
OK - so you are paying more attention to quality now, right? Starting to ask more about what makes a Mercedes so much better than, say, an Opel or a Dodge. What’s another step you can take to become a better tester? Simple - expand your horizons by reading. That’s what this blog entry is about: what can you read? The first place to start comes for free: read off the Internet. Read...
How Professional Testers Think: Why Microsoft... →
The easiest thing to criticize is that which one does not fully comprehend. There has been a lot of discussion lately about Jerome Groopman’s book How Doctor’s Think and a correlation between doctors in the medical profession and software testers. The book is an excellent read, and provides readers with valuable insights not only with medicine, but we can certainly abstract many of the...
InCisif.net 2.1, C# 3.0, LINQ and Lambda... →
Visual Studio 2008 is out, so we are updating InCisif.net API to support C# 3.0 features : LINQ and Lambda expressions. By internally rewriting our HTMLControls class this way, we add LINQ support.
Brent's Web Testing Toolbox →
Back in 2006 I wrote the article The
$60 Web Testing Toolbox with the intent of providing a cheap set of Web testing
tools for testers. Most of the tools were mentioned because they provided me the most
bang for the buck, but the reality is that good testing tools sometimes cost money.
I wanted to share with you my complete Web Testing Toolbox minus the cheap factor.
Developing software is not...
Flock let's you blog directly from the browser? →
Well - here’s my test of blogging to our MT site directly from the flock browser. If it does go through - then that’s amazing - good work by the flock folks. If you don’t know what i’m talking about - check out http://www.flock.com/ Also, if this works, hopefully I’ll be able to write more here, since the blog button is only a Ctrl-Shift-B away!
Blogged with...
I Want A BVT Blocking Bug For The Holidays →
[To John Rox’s “I Want A Hippopotamus For Christmas”, which has long been my favorite holiday song, and not only because it is accompanied by solo bassoon!]
I want a BVT blocking bug for the holidays* A BVT blocking bug I’m asking for Don’t want no UI bug, no meas-l-y P4 I want a bug that crashes my app like it’s never been crashed before
I want a BVT blocking...
Taking stock →
I no longer have the corner office. Neither does my boss, so it’s ok. We moved earlier this month into the reconfigured cube farm on the other side of the floor. I do have a window seat, and can see the bay without craning my neck. The little things are important. The new guy started earlier this month. Now that I’ve got time to bring him up to speed, I can bring him up to speed. I’m glad the next...
A user-friendly tool for Mercurial? →
This is an open request for help. I’ve started using Mercurial as my version control system of choice, and I’d like to start sharing controlled documents with a business user. Now this person is relatively sophisticated as a business user, but he’s not a programmer, so I sense he wouldn’t be comfortable using the hg command-line tool. I’ve asked him, but in the interim, I’m looking for a potential...
Blindly buying into rumor and innuendo: or how to... →
It never ceases to amaze me that every time we see a calamity involving software the immediate reaction of the sensationalist media types and other people who are generally misinformed is to blame inadequate testing. Recently, it seems that Joel Spolsky not only fell victim to rumors and misinformation, but also to the lunacy of blaming the testing organization for the rather lack luster adoption...
Cem Kaner's Recent Writing →
If you are like me, you’re always eager to read Cem Kaner’s writing. Lately, he’s been publishing in journals that you may have missed, so here are some links.
On teaching software testing online, in the December 2007 edition of the journal of the Association for Software Testing.
On certification and the testing job market, in the June 2007 edition of the journal of the AST.
On the...
Test →
Technorati Profile
Having Fun With Christmas and Santa Online →
It’s
that time of year again, time to get online and have some last minute Christmas and
Santa fun. There are a ton of things on the Web to do. The following links can keep
you and your child busy with Santa for hours. Merry Christmas!
Track Santa’s Christmas Eve progress
NORAD and CONAD (Track live, in 3D, with
Google Earth) GPS and Google Earth
NASA Santa
Tracker
Write and Send...
Did I miss the Spock memo? →
Invites to join the network site Spock continue to flood in. Thanks for keeping me in the loop, everyone. I really do appreciate it. I wonder, though, who started the wave, and why.
The power of checklists (especially when... →
Just stumbled on this post at InfoQ on the power of checklists. It talks about a low-tech approach to improving care in hospitals, by writing down the steps needed in various medical procedures and putting together a checklist for each case. I’ve seen the power of this approach at my own company — until we put together checklists with things we have to do when setting up various...
Questions about submitting to Agile 2008 →
Some questions on the submission process for Agile 2008, passed along by an Example stage committee member.
What the heck is a “stage” anyway?
I am thinking of a stage as a “conference within a conference.” It’s like a stage at a large music festival, where there’s a particular physical location where you might go to hear blues. (Plug here for Karen Carroll.) Buy a pass to the music festival...
Conference of the Association for Software Testing... →
CALL FOR PAPERS
The 3rd Annual Conference of the Association of Software Testing (CAST) 2008 http://www.associationforsoftwaretesting.org/CAST2008 Toronto, Ontario, Canada, July 14-16, 2008 Beyond the Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Software Testing Keynote Presentation by Gerald M. Weinberg
The Association for Software Testing is pleased to announce its third annual conference...
Discombobulation Testing →
I do not like software that discombobulates users. I find that software error handling and reporting often confuses users more than it helps. Several months back, I created and wrote about a mnemonic of guideword heuristics that I have been using for testing error handling and reporting. I have found this useful in my own testing and have received some positive feedback from others that are using...
Why Labels For Test Techniques? →
Steve Swanson is very new to testing. I predict he has a great future. He has already noticed that the common idea of boundary testing is almost content-free. Michael Bolton and I do a whole session on how to turn boundary testing into a much more intellectual engaging activity. At the end of his post, he identifies one of the major weaknesses of the classic notion of boundary testing. This...
Links for 2007-12-20 [del.icio.us] →
Orkut XSS Worm
When to write test helper code →
On the agile-testing list, I answered this question:
So for the first time in many, many years I’m not in a test management position, and I’m writing tests, automating them, etc. We’re using a tool called soapUI to automate our web services testing–it’s a handy tool, supports Groovy scripting which allows me to go directly to the DB to validate the results of a given method, etc. One feature of...
Orkut XSS Worm →
World’s Most Inquisitive Tester is an Indian →
No, not me! James Bach published a post mentioning that his vote for the World’s Most Inquisitive Tester is for Shrini Kulkarni and I am proud, he is from India. The moment I read that post from James, I took my mobile phone outside my pocket, dialled Shrini Kulkarni’s number and congratulated him for the appreciation he got and for the challenges he gives to testers through his...
Can a Non-Sapient Test Exist? →
My vote for the World’s Most Inquisitive Tester is Shrini Kulkarni. He asks: Do you believe that “non sapient” tests exist or for that matter - any part (seems like a very negligibly small portion of entire universe of skilled human testing) of testing be “non sapient” ?
A sapient process is any process that relies for its success on an appropriately skilled human. A sapient test would...
Soliciting reviewers and advice-givers →
I’ve begun work in earnest on Ruby Scripting for Leopard. I’d like to assemble an audience who can review drafts and tell me what people like them need. I’ve set up a mailing list.
The one sentence description of the book is “How to do anything AppleScript can, but in Ruby.” That is, the main focus will be using Ruby to control other apps like Mail or Safari. It’ll also show you how to write code...
What is Test Automation? →
There seems to be a lot of confusion about this.
Test automation is any use of tools to aid testing. Test automation has been around since DAY ONE of the computing industry. And never in that history has test automation been an “automatic way of doing what testers were doing before”, unless you ignore a lot of what testers actually do.
For the same reason, a space probe is not “an automatic way...
Dynamic test doubles and brittle tests →
Just a quick one. I’ll write the proof later. People commonly complain to me that when they try to test-drive code with test doubles (say with JMock), they end up with brittle tests: when the code changes, all these tests change. I understand, because it used to be that way for me, too. Nowadays, it doesn’t cause me a problem, and I believe it’s because my interfaces tend to stabilize quickly, and...
Klutzes, Savants, And Mediums (Oh My) →
Recently I overheard a developer describing how his wife constantly interrupts him when he is thinking (i.e., seemingly doing nothing) rather than waiting until he was at a place where he could process what she had to say. It seems he has taken to kicking off a full build when he needs to think, as his wife figures constant activity on his monitor means he is busy.
I once heard of a husband and...
Evidence That Context-Driven Thinking is Not Easy →
Sometimes people hear about the Context-Driven School of Testing and tell me there’s no need for it, because nobody disagrees with the importance of context.
And then I read things like this from Alberto Savoia. I don’t know how to account for it, except to say that it’s the mentality that I’m fighting against. If you want to see an example of what I think is wrong with our industry, there you...
Interview on Dr. Dobb's Journal →
I wask kindly asked to answer five question for the Braidy Tester’s Dr. Dobb’s Journal Testing and Debugging page. It was a nice chance to reflect, and you can read my ramblings here: http://www.ddj.com/blog/debugblog/archives/2007/12/five_questions_41.html
Enjoy!
The Python Papers - Screen Scraping Article →
The new issue of the Python Papers is out. It includes a small article I wrote
called: Screen Scraping Web Pages
The issue can be downloaded here: The
Python Papers, Volume 2, Issue 4 (pdf) This tutorial shows how to programmatically retrieve a stock quote
from Google Finance. It uses Python’s high level Web API and screen scraping
with regular expressions.
(Omni)Focus on what matters now! →
In the process of learning to use OmniFocus to Get Things Done, I have changed the way I group projects into folders. I started by grouping projects by purpose. I later realized why OmniFocus doesn’t have task priority: it has project priority built in, just by moving projects around in the Projects view. This made me think that I should throw away most of my task due dates, which I’ve done, and...
Sapient Testing Rules →
Hey, somebody at AST must have read my blog when I coined the term “sapient testing“, because they named their magazine after it.
I’m still waiting for people to pick up on my other coinage: mythomemetic, which is an adjective meaning “not informed by experience or wisdom, but rather hearsay and wishful thinking.” I’ll use it in a sentence: “The speaker peppered his talk with mythomemetic cliches...
Sapient Testing: Smart Stuff for Career Software... →
December Issue of the Association for Software Testing Newsletter Now Available
I am proud to have my newest article published in the AST Newsletter, now titled Sapient Testing Magazine. You can download the December issue of Sapient Testing Magazine here.
Ruby to Growl, with callbacks →
I wanted to write a script that used Growl to notify a user. That user could click on the Growl sidle-up, and that would make the script do something. It took me a while to figure out callbacks from Growl to the originating app, so I thought I’d write it down.
There are a couple of Growl libraries out there, but the code that best suited my needs comes from Satoshi Nakagawa’s LimeChat. Since it’s...
Python Experts - Why They Do Python →
I was recently interviewed for the article: Python
Experts - Why They Do Python
I don’t think I am even close to an “expert”, but it was nice being asked to participate.
DrivenQA joins the Twittersphere →
At DrivenQA we have been Twitter fans for several months now. Whilst initially sceptical, we have found it is a great communication tool. We thought it was about time to set up an account for DrivenQA communications specifically.
