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I’ve just started doing some work with a new client, and one of the things I’m doing is helping the team get started with some basic testing. The team consists mostly of programmers out of academia – they can write some code but have never written comm…

I’ve been setting up Jenkins for a client. While setting up a project, I ran into a very strange problem in which Jenkins (or more precisely, the git plugin) couldn’t find git.
Here’s what I did:1. install Jenkins2. create a project (call it “Foo”)3. s…

I’ve been working with a client who has a group of academic engineers. These are very smart people who haven’t ever built a product or worked in commercial software. So they asked me, “Can you teach me testing?”
Well, yes. I can teach you about testing…

Textaurant is a webapp. It displays, routes, and gathers information. It sends text messages, and we emphasize the user experience on mobile browsers. The number of technologies we could have used to build Textaurant is really quite large. We could hav…

Let’s say for the sake of argument that we would like to do feature-oriented releases.
Why We Might Do SoThere are a number of reasons we might choose to do a release based on its contents (features) rather than a date. These include, for example:1. be…

I’ve recently started working with Heroku for the first time; we’re hosting a Ruby on Rails app on a shared database there. I’ve had sites hosted on Amazon EC2 for years, so I’m used to working with virtual machines in cloud environments, but Heroku is…

I’ve been working on a variety of projects lately that are staffed very differently. One project has a dedicated test team, and a development team. One project has no dedicated tester, and the development team is terrified that they “don’t know how to …

Last night I was talking with a friend about a team and a manager who was asking for excessive status updates. The manager was new to the team, was asking for updates in two places (on a wiki and email), and the team was getting demoralized. So what’s …

Most systems have intent. They – courtesy of their creators – have workflows, expected usage patterns, etc. At their core, the creators of the system had one or more ideas of how the system would be used, and they optimized the system for those uses an…

Tonight I’ll be participating in a Twitter forum for AST candidates. Here’s how it works:When: August 1, 9:00pm Eastern timeWhere: Twitter. Look for #ASTElectWho: Four of the five candidates will be answering your questions: me, Matt Heusser, Michael L…