Exploration Through Example

Example-driven development, Agile testing, context-driven testing, Agile programming, Ruby, and other things of interest to Brian Marick

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Tue, 29 Apr 2003

iTunes 4

When I was about 12, I would stay up late Saturday nights to listen to the local community college station's alternative show. "What is this Frank Zappa creature?" They say that the Golden Age of science fiction is 12; for me it was also the Golden Age of Rock.

When I was a freshman in college, I became a huge Prokofiev fan. I actually signed up for two years of Russian just so I could read Nestyev's biography in the original. (That proved to be a mistake...)

In recent years, I've drifted away from music, but some of my enthusiasm came back in the last few months. I've listened obsessively to mostly old fogey music: the Clash's London Calling, Patti Smith, Springsteen (especially Nebraska), and Shostakovich's 8th. So Apple's new iTunes music store came at a vulnerable moment.

It's not possible, maybe, for a 43 year old without any particular musical talent or training to recapture that feeling that music matters, but I have to say I feel close to that tonight. Being able to reach out to a world of songs that mattered to me, click on one, and have it...

Good job, Apple. Good idea. Fine execution. But where are the Stones?

## Posted at 20:52 in category /mac [permalink] [top]

Ferment: Roles, names, and skills

Mike Clark writes "I'm on a mission to help tear down the barriers we've so methodically built up between QA and developers. [...] So starting right now I'm making a resolution to not use the label 'QA' or 'tester'." He also recommends the use of tools like FIT that everyone can understand.

Greg Vaughn has a response. "I'm not convinced abolishing the terms 'QA' and 'tester' is the right approach." He comments on different skills in a way that reminds me of Bret's paper 'Testers and Developers Think Differently'.

I think there's a sea change going on. In many companies, the time of unthinkingly "throwing it over the wall to the testing team" is coming to an end. That was an expression of cultural assumptions:

• that business relationships, indeed all relationships, should be assumed to be corrupt. (Well, sometimes they are.)

• that a job is best done one thing at a time. First you build the car, then you check the car, then you fix the car: the so-called "scrap and rework" assembly line. That's unpopular in this day of lean manufacturing, but there's also something to it. See what Esther Derby writes on multitasking. Frequent context switching poses a risk to flow.

• that people cannot be adequately self-critical. In testing, this view was made part of the lore by the seminal Art of Software Testing. By this view, a close relationship between testers and programmers will, though groupthink, mean that weaknesses aren't probed. (The same would be true of a close relationship between a customer representative and the development team.) See also critiques of the performance of "embedded reporters" in the recent war.

• that specialists trump generalists every time.

I want to throw out those assumptions. I've long believed in tight working relationships between testers and programmers. And yet... whatever we do also has to accommodate the exceptions to our desires. We will learn a lot in the next few years about balancing these forces (groupthink vs. teamwork in agile projects, etc.). It's an important conversation, and I look forward to experience reports from Mike and Greg and others.

## Posted at 08:52 in category /testing [permalink] [top]