Qualifying quantitative risk
Let’s start with quantifying qualitative risk first. Ages ago I was under pressure from some upper management to justify timelines, and I found a lot of advice about using risk as a tool not only to help managers see what they’re getting from the time spent developing a feature (i.e, less risk) but also to… Read more
The column that shall not be named
Until recently my team had a very simple set up for our sprint board, with just four steps: Tickets would start as “To Do”, move to “In Progress” when somebody started working on it, then put into “Code Review”, and when everything looked good the code was merged and the ticket marked “Done”. This worked… Read more
Unit tests versus the unit tested
I recently read the great and oft-cited article about testing microservice architectures by Cindy Sridharan over on Medium. It’s broadly applicable beyond just “microservices”, so I highly recommend giving it a read. I was struck by this passage in particular: The main thrust of my argument wasn’t that unit testing is completely obviated by end-to-end tests, but that being… Read more
If you didn’t test it, it doesn’t work
Gary Bernhardt has a great talk online from 2012 called Boundaries, about how design patterns influence, for better and worse, the testing that can be done. In particular he advocates a “core” and “shell” model, having many independent functional cores and one orchestrating shell around them. The idea is that each functional core can be… Read more
Debating the Modern Testing Principles
Last week I had the opportunity to moderate a discussion on the Modern Testing Principles being developed by Alan Page and Brent Jensen with a group of QA folks. I’m a relative late-comer to the AB Testing podcast, having first subscribed somewhere around Episode 60, but have been quite interested in this take on testing…. Read more