Top News Testing

Pomodoro - An Agile Approach to Time Management

A personal time management approach known as "The Pomodoro Technique" is becoming quite popular with agile practitioners. Pomodoro includes a number of practices similar to those used by an agile team: time-boxing, frequent opportunities to inspect-and-adapt, estimation, a preference for low-tech tools, and an emphasis on maintaining a sustainable pace.

Opinion: Pair Programming Is Not For The Masses

Pair Programming continues to be one of the most debated and controversial practices of recent years. Most proponents don't falter in their praise of the benefits, but many of even these same people will admit they struggle to get pairing really going in their shops. Why? Obie Fernandez opinions 10 reasons why this might be so.

26 Hints for Successful Agile Development

Keith Swenson, recently compiled a list of 26 hints for Agile software development. Keith suggested that he frequently collects nuggets of wisdom on various topics and the list is a distilled set of hints which really matter for Agile software development.

XP or Scrum, Either, Both, or Neither?

Which is better? Scrum or XP? Is there one that is more applicable than the other or is there another alternative?

Maintainable Automated Acceptance Tests

Automated tests that are brittle and expensive to maintain have led to companies abandoning test automation initiatives, according to Dale Emery. In a newly published paper, Dale shares some practical ways to avoid common problems with test automation. He starts with some typical automation code and evolves in ways that make it more robust, and less expensive to maintain.

Top Articles Testing

Testing Ajax Applications with Selenium

This article focuses on some of the recent trends within the Agile community by briefly describing some alternatives to today's well known Agile processes. Particularly focusing on estimation, forecasting deliverables and the increased impact Lean manufacturing has had on the Agile community.

Visualizing Agile Projects using Kanban Boards

In the spirit of "information radiators and "big visible charts" Kenji Hiranabe proposes using Kanban Boards to organize three viewpoints (Time, Task, and Team) so the whole team understands the current status of the project and can work in an autonomous, motivated and collaborative manner.

The Role of Project Managers in Agile

Agile, as per books does not talk of role of manager but talks of a coach/facilitator. This article first explains the role of project manager in general in any industry and then tries to map it with the role of coach/facilitator in Agile. During this discussion, the article also tries to widen the scope of being a coach/facilitator.

"Flirting" With Your Customers

All over the world, there are classes that teach people how to flirt. A German university even requires their IT engineers take a flirting class-not to attract a partner, but to learn how to interact more effectively in the workplace. Flirting means connecting with others, and connecting is the key to good communication. That is what the first principal of the Agile Manifesto is all about.

Burndown Analysis for Managing Productivity & Schedules

Managing the productivity and the schedules on a project is always a big challenge due to the complexities involved in taking the decisions fast. We attempt to use the "Burndown" information to address this issue. We show how a burndown chart comes in handy when a Project team is faced with the tough questions on the issues pertaining to Schedule, Resource Management and Productivity.

Top Presentations Testing

Three Years of Real-World Ruby

Martin Fowler talks about ThoughtWorks's experience with using Ruby on client projects for the past three years, and the creation of a Ruby-based product 'Mingle'.

I Come to Bury Agile, Not to Praise It

Agile came from small, colocated projects in the 1990s. It has spread to large, globally distributed commercial projects, affecting the IEEE, the PMI, the SEI and the Department of Defense. Agile now sits in a larger landscape and should be viewed accordingly. This talk shows that landscape, clarifying how classical agile fits in and what constitutes effective development outside that narrow area.

Integration Tests Are a Scam

Integration tests are a scam. You're probably writing 2-5% of the integration tests you need to test thoroughly. You're probably duplicating unit tests all over the place. Your integration tests probably duplicate each other all over the place. When an integration test fails, who knows what's broken? Learn the two-pronged attack that solves the problem: collaboration tests and contract tests.

From Good to Great Developer

Chris Hedgate makes a difference between a good and a great developer. The former writes code quickly, knows how to solve problems, but his code tends to be hard to maintain on the long run. The good developer keeps an eye on the future trying to make sure the code evolves cleanly. Hedgate advices on how to move from good to great.

Behaviour-Driven Development - a road to effective design and clean code

In this talk, Dan contrasts the traditional top-down and bottom-up approaches with a proven "outside-in" approach based on real life experience - engaging with and listening to our stakeholders. He shows how this can allow us to stay firmly on track, leading to clean code and effective design that provides maximum value to our stakeholders, not just the famous Scrum Product Owner

Top Interviews Testing

Linda Rising on Placebos

Linda Rising tells us about the effectiveness of placebos and the strength of our beliefs in medicine and how these same things might relate to software development. Is Agile software development just a placebo effect? Do we get better results because we expect and believe things will get better? Or is there something more to Agile?

Coplien and Martin Debate TDD, CDD and Professionalism

Debate sprang up at JAOO '07 around Bob Martin's assertion that "nowadays it is irresponsible for a developer to ship a line of code he has not executed in a unit test." In this InfoQ video, he debated with Jim Coplien on this and other topics, including Design by Contract vs. TDD and how much up-front architecture is needed to keep a system consistent with the business domain model.

Joshua Kerievsky about Industrial XP

In this interview taken by Sadek Drobi of InfoQ, Joshua Kerievsky, founder of Industrial Logic, talks about Industrial Extreme Programming which extends XP by including practices dealing with management, customers and developers.

Christopher Avery on Responsibility

Christopher Avery explains why personal responsibility is a foundational skill for any and all teams and shares his model for personal responsibility and how this affects individuals and teams in the workplace. He goes further with several concrete tips on how to form successful, high performing teams.

Elisabeth Hendrickson Describes the AAFT

Elisabeth Hendrickson describes the Agile Alliance Functional Testing Tools Group (AAFT) as a community that is helping to foster and create the next generation of functional testing tools. In this interview at Agile 2008, she tells us about the current state and the current needs of the Agile community around functional testing tools beyond FIT and FITNesse.

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