Exploration Through Example

Example-driven development, Agile testing, context-driven testing, Agile programming, Ruby, and other things of interest to Brian Marick
191.8 167.2 186.2 183.6 184.0 183.2 184.6

Mon, 09 Jun 2003

Involving the user in agile projects

Canonical XP has a customer role that speaks with a single voice. That role has the hard job of integrating the voices of perhaps a bazillion users, clumped into overlapping interest groups. But how are those voices integrated?

Charles Miller has an interesting post on dealing with bug reports in open source projects. There's something about it that makes me think it's relevant. There's an air of balancing forces: of treating the users with respect, of learning from them, but also of protecting the development team from being thrashed by them. Not directly applicable, I think, but worth pondering.

## Posted at 08:48 in category /agile [permalink] [top]

Normal accidents and pair programming

Keith Ray contrasts code reviews and pair programming. I'm reminded of an editorial I wrote several years ago. I'd just read Charles Perrow's book Normal Accidents. It's about accidents in complex systems. It describes characteristics of those systems that bias them toward failure. In the essay, I applied his ideas to pair programming and inspections, suggesting that pair programming is less less likely to suffer normal accidents.

Note: the second figure got messed up in production. It should be just like the first, but with clouds that wholely or partially obscure the boxes and lines behind them. I should produce a fixed copy, but I lack time.

## Posted at 08:37 in category /agile [permalink] [top]

About Brian Marick
I consult mainly on Agile software development, with a special focus on how testing fits in.

Contact me here: marick@exampler.com.

 

Syndication

 

Agile Testing Directions
Introduction
Tests and examples
Technology-facing programmer support
Business-facing team support
Business-facing product critiques
Technology-facing product critiques
Testers on agile projects
Postscript

Permalink to this list

 

Working your way out of the automated GUI testing tarpit
  1. Three ways of writing the same test
  2. A test should deduce its setup path
  3. Convert the suite one failure at a time
  4. You should be able to get to any page in one step
  5. Extract fast tests about single pages
  6. Link checking without clicking on links
  7. Workflow tests remain GUI tests
Permalink to this list

 

Design-Driven Test-Driven Design
Creating a test
Making it (barely) run
Views and presenters appear
Hooking up the real GUI

 

Popular Articles
A roadmap for testing on an agile project: When consulting on testing in Agile projects, I like to call this plan "what I'm biased toward."

Tacit knowledge: Experts often have no theory of their work. They simply perform skillfully.

Process and personality: Every article on methodology implicitly begins "Let's talk about me."

 

Related Weblogs

Wayne Allen
James Bach
Laurent Bossavit
William Caputo
Mike Clark
Rachel Davies
Esther Derby
Michael Feathers
Developer Testing
Chad Fowler
Martin Fowler
Alan Francis
Elisabeth Hendrickson
Grig Gheorghiu
Andy Hunt
Ben Hyde
Ron Jeffries
Jonathan Kohl
Dave Liebreich
Jeff Patton
Bret Pettichord
Hiring Johanna Rothman
Managing Johanna Rothman
Kevin Rutherford
Christian Sepulveda
James Shore
Jeff Sutherland
Pragmatic Dave Thomas
Glenn Vanderburg
Greg Vaughn
Eugene Wallingford
Jim Weirich

 

Where to Find Me


Software Practice Advancement

 

Archives
All of 2006
All of 2005
All of 2004
All of 2003

 

Join!

Agile Alliance Logo