Exploration Through Example

Gojko Adzic has a nice summary of what Jeff Patton’s been saying recently about a way Agile projects fail.

My only quibble with Jeff’s description is that he distinguishes between “incremental” and “iterative” development. That has the same problem that’s bedeviled “verification and validation” for years: the common English words mean sort of the same thing, and the words begin with the same letter, so many people (me, Jeff himself when it comes to V&V) can’t remember the difference.

At SDTConf, I suggested that Jeff use “assembly” for “incremental” and “growth” for “iterative” (or is it the other way around?)

The Agile2008 submission system is now ready for use. The deadline is February 25th. However: we’re not gathering up submissions for one big review at the end. Instead, committee members and anyone else who wants to will post comments on a submission soon after it arrives. You can keep revising and improving your submission until the deadline.

At James Bach’s request: testing needs incisive and restless thinkers.

UPDATE: As requested in comments to the original posting, the context:

In the late 90’s and early 00’s, I was a vigorous proponent of the Context-Driven school of testing. As was typical of members of that school, I was intensely interested in test design, which I’d define as “thinking well about how to execute the app in order to fulfill the testing team’s goal.” (My favorite goal being to be “a service organization whose job is to reduce damaging uncertainty about the perceived state of the product.”) Also: people thinking well about anything deserve respect, more respect than testers got. So I was an advocate for the worth of tester as an identity.

Since then, especially since around 2003, my interests have drifted to the point where I now refer to myself as “having a testing slant” rather than “being a tester.” (And, more and more, I use the word “examples” rather than tests to remind myself that I’m not doing what I used to do.) I’ve also emphasized tendencies I’ve long had that didn’t come into play as much in my testing days. For example, I’m much more focused on harmony and trust and deferring to others than I used to be (although that tendency can be seen way back in 1998’s “Working effectively with developers“).

There’s a problem when someone who used to write exclusively about X stops. Does it mean that he repudiates X? Am I now happy if testers have low status? Do I think that testers who don’t code are useless? Do I think manual testing is rote work that doesn’t require incisive thought?

I could argue that I haven’t completely stopped writing. If you look at my recent test design links post, you’ll find links to a bunch of writings squarely in the context-driven tradition, and such linking signals approval. Still, it doesn’t hurt to be completely explicit, especially because (1) I write a lot about automated tests, (2) test automation comes with a lot of historical baggage and so is an emotionally charged topic, and (3) the early interactions between the Agile proponents and testers generated even more baggage because the Agile proponents often did act exactly like we testers were used to programmers acting: dismissive. Fortunately, that’s mostly corrected itself. But still… hurt feelings persist.

Because of all that, the original statement seemed useful.

I’ve been growing a little disillusioned with my graphical workflow tests: implementing the test support code seems like a lot of work for little benefit. (It has nothing to do with the graphics—I’d have to write the same methods in a FitLibrary DoFixture or if I wrote the workflows directly in Ruby.)

So it was with a heavy sigh that I began to create this test:
(more…)

At James Bach’s request: testing needs incisive and restless thinkers.

UPDATE: As requested in the comments, I’ve expanded on this.

I wrote a paper for PNSQC 2005 that I seem to never have put on line. Here’s the abstract:

This paper argues that the continuing problems we have with requirements elicitation and transmission are not a result of poor skills or sloppy people. It’s rather that the entire idea is based on dubious assumptions. A different assumption is introduced, namely that effectiveness can only be obtained by parties having iterative conversations over time, and that communication is meant more to provoke right action than to transmit understanding. Based on examples of this assumption in practice, suggestions for software development are sketched.

“The Gap Between Business and Code” (PDF)

This sounds like a neat event. I’ve put it on my calendar. (UPDATE: I’m now one of the organizers.)

Do you wish you could attend the Agile conferences and XP days, but can’t get the funding or the travel budget or the time off work? Well there is one agile event that you can even attend from your own bath — the Naked Agilists!

Last year’s event was so successful that we’re running another. And you only need Skype to be able to attend. Save the date now:

Date: Saturday 19-Jan-08
Time: 20:00 GMT - 21:30 GMT
Venue: Your place, or mine

The event format is a Skype conference, supported by chat, and a website hosting slides and stuff. There’s also a mailing list where you can find more details of what happened last time, and loads of feedback on the event itself.

The event will be chaired by Leigh Mullin, who did such a great job last time — particularly to keep out the inevitable “tourists” who were hoping the “naked agilists” all had webcams! Please join the mailing list and propose a session. This time around we’re hoping to run with two different kinds of session:

• Experience Reports, lasting 2, 5 or 10 minutes. Think of these as mini blog posts — your chance to share a quick idea or observation with the rest of us. Last time, most presenters prepared a few slides to support their session, and most were also followed by a few minutes of Q&A, discussion and Skype chat.

• Open Questions. You’ll get 1 minute to ask the group a question, and then there will be 10 minutes of discussion. This is your chance to tap into the experience and expertise of the assembled agile experts.

If you would like to present or table a question, please join the mailing list and post your suggestion there. We’ll put the programme together early in the New Year, so please get your entries in early. Detailed intructions for participating in the call itself will only be posted on the mailing list, so even if you simply want to be in the “audience”, join the list now to avoid disappointment.

A couple years ago, Agile “crossed the chasm” (Geoffrey Moore’s term). For a while, I’ve been meaning to write a blog post questioning whether that high tech adoption model is working for Agile. Fortunately, I don’t have to. I gave a lightning talk on the topic at the Functional Testing Tools workshop, and a video of that talk has been posted.

Other lightning talk videos from the workshop are available. (Warning: my “boundary objects” talk is incoherent in a crucial place because I used the wrong word twice and then changed the subject too quickly.)

Many people over the years have attended my talks partially or entirely to hear about cows. About cows with portholes, about cows eating car batteries, about the mystery of what the omasum is for. I got those stories from my wife, longtime professor of Food Animal Medicine, and tried to deftly tie them into the ostensible topics of my talks.

That era draws to an end today. Today she becomes assistant dean for Academic Affairs and Curriculum, responsible for developing clinical skills labs, riding herd on all the courses and curricula committees, figuring out how to tell if students have learned what they’ve supposed to, and so forth. Stuff to do with learning and humans: what relevance could it have to software development?

But all is not lost. She remains director of the campus-wide Agricultural Animal Care and Use Program and Attending Veterinarian for agricultural animals. If you want to do fiendish experiments on cows, pigs, or chickens, you have to get past her first. So the scope of stories broadens, in a way. For example: chickens, she tells me just now, like to play with strings. If you want to make a chicken happier, hang a string in its cage. They like some color strings better than others.

You may hear more next semester, when she teaches VCM510, Science of Animal Well-Being. To learn about the relevance of chicken strings to us, you’ll have to attend my next talk.

Now, chastened by our modern knowledge of the limitations of knowledge, of reason, of ourselves, we know that those bright certainties are not as certain or as real as we once thought. But we’ve spent our time mourning, in depression and cynicism and irony, and we’ve all been taught that, if truth is a slippery and uncertain thing, lies are very real.

Mark Bernstein, from his series on NeoVictorian Computing, specifically part 3, Age of Heroes.