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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Mon, 16 Feb 2004

The tick-tick-tick of Panther

OS X Panther, recently installed, is driving me insane. Right now, my TiBook's drive is going tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick at slightly less than one second intervals.

It does not seem to be paging, since there's 171ish meg of free memory and the pagein/pageout numbers do not change. And yet if I exit a program, the ticking sometimes stops.... There... It did.

But it doesn't seem to be that program that's at fault. I often exit Word and the ticking stops. But sometimes it doesn't, so I exit Mozilla and the ticking stops. But exiting Mozilla alone doesn't always stop it. Etc.

And sometimes starting a program makes the ticking stop.

I've also gotten it into a mode where it's normally not ticking, but exposing the Dock by moving my mouse to the edge of the screen makes it start and continue as long as the Dock is visible.

(I should be systematically investigating, but my time is tight. So I'm not doing things like waiting to see how often the ticking stops on its own.)

Anyone have any insight into this? Mail me. I fear I'll soon be running down the street screaming "Make them stop! The sounds in my head! Make them stop!" That's probably a bad career move.

## Posted at 10:39 in category /misc [permalink] [top]

Exploratory testing at Agile Development Conference

Elisabeth Hendrickson and I will be giving a tutorial titled "Exploratory Testing for Agile Projects" at Agile Development Conference, which will be held June 23-26 in Salt Lake City, USA. We'll be using the time until then to bash together my ideas about how exploratory testing will mutate in the specific context of agile projects, Elisabeth's ideas about the same, and Elisabeth's vastly greater experience with exploratory testing. I'll be using this blog to talk about some of what we're doing, partly to help me figure things out, partly to help me learn how to articulate ideas. (I worked with Elisabeth on the tutorial last Saturday, and I was remarkably inarticulate.)

## Posted at 07:36 in category /2004conferences [permalink] [top]