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

Sun, 19 Sep 2004

Thoughts on Andy Schneider's comments

(Andy Schneider commented on my post on cybernetics and Agile methods. I've finally gotten a spare moment to respond.

Andy's right that agile teams are too often inward-looking. But I don't think that's a reason to avoid using the team as a unit of analysis. One way to talk about a system is to find useful components and look at their interactions. (That's not to say that the team is the only useful unit of analysis; it might well be instructive to slice things along a different dimension.)

I agree with Andy that Agile teams err when they think the only feedback that matters is instructions coming in and software going out. That's one of the reasons why I was so taken with Pickering's descriptions of devices reaching out, actively exploring their environments, and adapting to them. I think that's what Andy wants, and I'm suggesting cybernetics might have learned something we can steal.

I wasn't at all clear in my description of "teams succeeding in their own terms." By that, I meant to suggest that the team is delivering what some representative of the business said was business value, but that either the representative was wrong or someone with more power wasn't interested in that business value. So the project gets canned because it wasn't adapted to its real environment, only to an economic fairy tale: the corporation run by profit-maximizing economic actors.

## Posted at 16:59 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