I looked around the office, and there was no one working. No typing. No staring confusedly at code. No arguments about where to eat lunch. Empty rooms. There are more and more workplaces like that. People start remote working, or on leave. Or worse. But how does work continue? Slowly. Read more…
Once more unto the breach, my friends. Once more. This time I took the Test Maintenance presentation to Tel Aviv. The presentation is right there below. Test maintenance is something nobody loves doing, but everyone must. The presentation is about what we do when we’ve accompanied lots of tests, some Read more…
Making the “Zen and the art of Test Maintenance” workshop into an hour long presentation, I made way north on a dark and stormy night. It was lovely to see old and new acquaintances. I saw a nice demo of new-ish open source tool called Oxygen, presented by Nick Dimer. Read more…
Last week I came back from Let’s Test South Africa. As always, Let’s Test stood up to its name. It’s a small conference, with a lot of hands on-learning, and a focus on community. It’s about testers meeting other testers, learning, and feeling good about it. My workshop “Zen And Read more…
Last time, I gave you the short-short version of thermodynamics. We talked about how entropy grows rampant, as well as creating waste in the system, if it doesn’t have constant energy input. Let’s get back to technical debt. The technical debt metaphor has two parts: First, it slows us down Read more…
Goodheart’s Law states that when a metric becomes a goal, it is no longer a good metric. I don’t know when technical debt became a metric. But SonarQube calculates and reports it as such. If this calculation is correct (you must be scratching your head right now) people may assume Read more…
We’re getting there. Here’s the final nail in the coffin: We are bad at translation and unfortunately, we do a lot of translations. In a typical application development, we’ve got a user who has a problem: “Why can’t I see the content when I open the app?” The business person Read more…
On to the next issue: We trust in the “others”. Way too much. Have you ever considered how much of the code we actually write makes of the whole application? I mean, let’s start with hardware. Computers, wires, antennas, satellites. We use them as part of our solution, and they Read more…
We’ve looked at a couple of excuses to where bugs come from, now let’s dig deeper. And we’re going to start with something that’s hard to admit: We don’t know exactly what we’re doing. The best of us already know that, and the rest of us have not figured it Read more…
While we’re on the subject of favorite excuses, let’s talk about a couple more I got. It’s not my fault! pic.twitter.com/p2jeziwFpt — James Grenning (@jwgrenning) July 22, 2019 It looks more like an escape pod than a bug. Ironically, “don’t look at me” does the exact opposite. It looks very Read more…