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Category: Terminology

Is “QA” too narrow?

Twice this week, with different people, I had a conversation about what to call the category of work that I’ve been focusing on lately around integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines and making releases as smooth and easy as possible. As part of the discussions, I floated the idea of it all being under the… Read more

Achieve the why by doing the how

With the start of 2019 there’s been a glut of resolutions going by my social media feeds, so it’s been the posts about explicitly not making resolutions that grab my attention. On YouTube, for example, John Green talked about making specific goals instead of resolutions, which made me think about my own resolutions in those… 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