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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Wed, 28 May 2003

The Earth from Mars

Jupiter, too. It's been colorized and enhanced, but still highly cool.

## Posted at 13:41 in category /misc [permalink] [top]

Links: Fowler, Vaughn, and Miller

A convalescing son watching a DVD on the iMac + an interruptible father nearby with a TiBook = a posting about some links, without the commentary they deserve.

Martin Fowler has a bliki, which is good news. His What Is Failure is a short and sweet summary of what's wrong with all those "28% of all projects fail" quotes. I'll leave the punch line to Martin, but he's given me a useful phrase.

Greg Vaughn has an essay on static vs. dynamic typing. I admire people whose attitude toward "either/or" debates is "some of both, please".

Charles Miller draws an analogy between quality and security. "Defense in depth" is a useful phrase. In testing, it's usually applied to a series of finer-grained tests (unit, integration, etc.). Do they provide defense in depth? Maybe. But perhaps not if the mechanisms by which different levels of tests are designed does not differ enough. (I've never met anyone who can articulate diffferent design criteria for integration testing. Inputs for integration tests seem to be picked either the same way as for unit tests or the same way as for whole-product tests. That, I think, makes them weaker than if one thought about integration tests differently.)

My own style these days is to lean heavily on test-first design, both at the "unit" level (where the programmer thinks of herself as the user) and at the whole-product level (where one hopes there's a business expert acting as a proxy for the user). But defense in depth argues for for a different type of thinking. Hence, exploratory testing.

## Posted at 13:06 in category /misc [permalink] [top]