We’re going on our family vacation soon, which gives us the opportunity to dabble in all kinds of activities. Including the one starting out with the question: “Are the kids’ passports still valid?”. Nope. And we’re just 3 weeks before the flight. Time to deal with the unexpected. The next day, the kids and I
I was recently a judge at ISTC, the Israeli Testing Cup finals. So how does one judge testing? What makes some testers better than others? A few things to note about the competition, which differentiates the testing situation from regular work: The team is presented with a product to test that they know nothing about, apart
Every now and then, I need to remind people what is the point of this agile thing. I know, I know, still they forget. Agility is the ability of the organization to react effectively to changes in a volatile environment. The “more” agile the organization, it can cope better, faster to things thrown at it.
When people first try scrum, or TDD (or any new process), they feel uncomfortable. We “know how to do” stuff, but then we’re asked to try on something new. Then our comfort zone alarm goes off. We feel constrained. Scrum puts limit on sprints, so we’ll need to actually help the testers finish testing our story.
I didn’t think that my Story Points story would garner such attention. Reactions were divided to two groups: the “Great Post” type, short and supportive. And the “You’re doing it wrong” type, long and argumentative. I can’t fault people for telling me “You’re doing it wrong” after I used it in that post. It did make me
I was in a client meeting for presenting the new states of Product Backlog Items (PBIs) in Microsoft TFS. When I received the invitation for the meeting, I was excited and curious . Excited because the team I was working with, finally had enough with the pre-built states. Curious because – why is there only
Why do we keep trying to attain control? Looking at reality with agile glasses (and even without them), we don’t like uncertainty, and control over a piece of reality relaxes us. A controlled environment is good for our health. In fact, it seems that when we are in control we don’t need to do anything.
Posts about agile dying or becoming irrelevant come and go. God knows I’ve contributed to that movement. The latest wave started with Agile Manifesto signatory Dave Thomas, with “Agile is dead, long live Agility”. The discussion later continued on Twitter and the XP mailing list under the title “Taking agile back”. Taking it from whom?
In a recent webinar I did about unit testing, I was asked if MSTest is a good framework to support scrum. Being, well, myself I started with “It’s the wrong question”. Obviously a test framework support any process or methodology. Specifically, a team implementing scrum, that doesn’t have any technical practices, can benefit from test
It was the nth time that a supplier has failed us. If we analyze it logically, there were two options: Get mad or roll with the punches. Since we’re not Vulcan, it’s not really a logical choice: what we felt is anger, defeat. Or both. Can’t do much with defeat. But anger is totally different.