Author Archives

I was reading an article this morning about how testers get and stay “technical”. Go read it, and then come back. I’ll wait.There are a lot of possible rants here:How is it that anyone can be involved in writing software and not know how to use basic t…

I was doing some performance work on an app last week, and we were making progress. We’d done a number of things: added an index, reworked an n+1 query problem on the main page, and a few other tweaks. I also emailed the person who controls production …

I had a very interesting conversation with a woman over the weekend about questioning. She told me a story…”One of the main things I learned in college was not to simply accept other people’s statements. Instead, I learned to question things and crea…

It feels so good to finish something. I commit the code, deploy the build, finish the test, whatever. Then I move on. Hooray!Well, actually, first there’s the bookkeeping to do. Bookkeeping is all the stuff outside the actual change that you have to do…

I’ve been thinking recently about different forms of trust. Trust is essential to any team work – a team that trusts each other will be more functional and get more done than a team that doesn’t trust each other.But there are different kinds of trust. …

Adam Goucher said this on Twitter today: “how to fail at anything ‘my boss is making me use java for this’. equally true for any language w/ ‘making me’. (just more so with java)”Now, I’m not going to say anything about Java; that’s not today’s point. …

At one client site, the engineering team has a policy of doing peer code reviews for every change set. It goes something like this:I make a change and test it (and change and test until it’s right)I package up the changeI send a note to the group chat …

Many of us have a single overarching goal…. and a whole lot of other stuff we have to do. For example, yesterday I had lunch with someone who is the (non-technical) founder of a very early stage startup. They have two people – the business guy and th…

I was doing some work with a team that had recently adopted SCRUM, and they were talking about their last planning meeting. We had met the week before the planning meeting, and we had practiced doing a planning session. When they got to the actual plan…

I do almost all of my work out of OmniFocus. At any given time, I’m working on a range of things, from projects for clients to maintenance tasks for old clients (yum update foo!) to articles, etc. There’s no way I can keep it all in my head, so I let O…