Test Obsessed

If you work in an Agile organization and are using a heavy weight specialized tool for test management, I have an important message for you: Stop. Seriously. Just stop. It’s getting in the way. If you are accustomed to heavyweight test management solutions, you might not realize the extent to which a test management tool [...]

This post started out as a quick little entry about a cool parlor trick you can do with RSpec to make it work for auto-generated test data. But in the middle of writing what was supposed to be a simple post, my tests found a subtle bug with bad consequences. (Yeah for tests!) So now [...]

It sounds like Joe Stump is having a bad time of it right now. Joe Stump, formerly of Digg, left Digg to co-found a Mobile games company. They released the first of their games, Chess Wars, in late June. Soon after, new players found serious problems that prevented them from playing the game. In response, [...]

I’ve been hinting about a new venture on Twitter, and it’s time to explain what’s going on. I’m in the process of opening a new office. Or rather, my company, Quality Tree Software, Inc. is opening a new space in our current building in Pleasanton, CA. It’s 1200 square feet of open-layout-Agile-goodness. When it’s done, [...]

I think it’s important to define “Agile” when I talk about “Agile Testing.” Agile is one of those capitalized umbrella terms, like Quality, that means many things to many people. And given that Agile Testing involves testing in an Agile context, it’s hard to talk about it if we have not established a shared understanding [...]

Robert Small wrote me with a question (which he kindly gave me permission to post here, along with my answer): My GUI developers are driving me nuts! They want to “fully automate” all testing for the GUI. I tried to explain that you cannot automate ease of use (usability) or look and feel and the [...]

I am so excited! Thanks to the efforts of my assistant Melinda, who did an awesome job laying out the design, and our friends at CafePress who do the manufacturing and shipping, we now offer a mug with heuristics from the wildly popular Test Heurististics Cheatsheet. Order one for yourself and for your favorite test [...]

A colleague recently described the requirements process in his (non-Agile) organization to me. In their process, the business people talk to the business analysts who talk to the systems analysts who give requirements to the programmers. As he was explaining all this, I couldn’t help but reflect on all the possible points of failure. I’ve [...]

I recently had the opportunity to visit AboutUs in Portland, OR. In case you’re not familiar with AboutUs, they’ve created a community-driven wikified guide to websites. (So how appropriate that I’m blogging this on the 14th birthday of the Wiki, as Ward Cunningham reminded us over Twitter, another catalytic technology.) Anyway, AboutUs is doing very [...]

Certification of software professionals has been a hot topic for quite a while. At least 15 years. Maybe longer. I keep hoping that the whole thing will blow over. But it hasn’t. And it’s not going to. Too many people have too much of a financial stake in the success of certifications. Certification customers, including [...]