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The Abolition of Ignorance[magazine]

The testing profession isn't easily mastered, and isn't something that can be perfected by practice alone. Good testers study testing to improve their knowledge of the areas they know about, but great testers strive to find out about areas of software testing they don't yet realize they don't know about.

Alan Page's picture Alan Page
Lessons Learned in Close Quarters Combat[magazine]

Few would think that the tactics employed by military and law-enforcement Special Forces to breach buildings under siege bears any relation to software project teams. After a number of weekends training with ex-military and ex-law-enforcement Special Forces—just for fun—Antony Marcano draws a surprising parallel between the dynamics of modern Special Forces "room-clearing" methods and the dynamics of modern software development teams.

Antony Marcano's picture Antony Marcano
The Key to Good Interviewing[magazine]

The foundation of any successful assessment is interviewing a diverse cross section of the staff. But asking the right questions and asking those questions right makes all the difference in the quality of information you can elicit from your interviewees.

Robert Sabourin's picture Robert Sabourin
Six Thinking Hats for Testers[magazine]

Fresh ideas can provoke us into discovering great insights: Six thinking hats did just that for Julian Harty, who then applied them to software testing with great success. He, and tens of others, has found the thinking hats easy to use, practical, and very productive. Read on to find out how you can apply them to your work.

Julian Harty
What's a Manager to Do?[magazine]

Self-organizing teams still need managers. But those managers need to rethink how they do their jobs and consider how much self-management the team can take on. Finding the sweet spot between hands on and hands off is the key.

Esther Derby's picture Esther Derby
A Map by Any Other Name[magazine]

A mapping illustrates a relationship between two things. In testing, a map might look like a road map, but it might also look like a list, a chart, a table, or a pile of stories. We can use any of these to help us think about test coverage.

Michael Bolton's picture Michael Bolton
Don't Fear the Repartee[magazine]

Conflict reduces people's productivity and generosity toward the organization and their coworkers. These four steps can help defuse a conflict situation and improve the chances for a solution that at the least, both parties can live with.

Nance Goldstein's picture Nance Goldstein
Train Wreck Spotting[magazine]

An oft-overlooked goal of encapsulation is to simplify usage. Without this sensibility, classes can end up with simplistic interfaces and callers can end up with method-call pile-ups.

Kevlin Henney's picture Kevlin Henney
Little Scrum Pigs and the Big, Bad Wolf[article]

While continuing to grow, the state of agile adoption seems to be plucked straight out of an Ayn Rand novel, where the acceptance of mediocrity has infected the masses like a plague. Half-hearted adoptions have led to half-hearted results (as in "we suck less") that in turn are leaving these organizations straddling a tipping point from which they more often than not slide backwards, rather than making the push over the top to high performance and exponential growth in ROI.

Michele Sliger's picture Michele Sliger
product quality assessment Simple Strategies to Keep Quality Visible[article]

In most projects, testers are the keepers of quality. Sharing the vision of quality with the entire team helps everyone involved in a project play a more active role in determining the state of quality in a product. In this column, Jeff Patton shares several innovative ideas he's seen in practice lately that have helped an entire team own up to the quality of its software.

Jeff Patton's picture Jeff Patton
Agile 2008 - Emily and Geoff Bache - Programming with the Stars and the TextTest framework[article]
Podcast

Bob speaks with Emily and Geoff Bache at the Agile 2008 conference.

Bob Payne's picture Bob Payne
Getting Started with Agile SCM[article]

A prerequisite to any of the Agile SCM practices, such as integration build, private build, unit tests, and the like, is being able to set up a developer’s private workspace with the right code and tools so that you can code, build and test. In this article, we discuss the important, and often overlooked process of creating a development workspace, which is to say, getting started.

Top 9 challenges of adopting Scrum: Meta-ScrumMaster Role, Cowboy Behavior, and Agile is Not Easy.[article]

Introducing Scrum can be fun, but can also be quite a challenge. There are numerous hurdles to overcome, new practices to master and problems to solve. In this article, we will present some of the mistakes we have seen made, or made ourselves when introducing Scrum at various companies. In this last article, we'll discuss the meta-ScrumMaster role, cowboy behavior, and why agile is not easy.

TechWell Contributor's picture TechWell Contributor
Offshore and Agile - Real Scenarios[article]

A lot of heated debate is going on topics such as "Can we develop software using an offshore model with agile methodologies?" This article is my humble attempt to give more insight on this question using a story to describe a real scenario with some assumptions and with not so real people.

TechWell Contributor's picture TechWell Contributor
Agile Testing: Asking the Right Questions[article]

Good testers don't just question the final product. They question the product before work has even started and while it is being developed. And they also challenge the team itself. While this is true of many traditional testers, These lines of questioning to be more prevalent on agile teams because a "whole team" mentality is encouraged and quality is a team responsibility.

TechWell Contributor's picture TechWell Contributor

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