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• Knowing where your going before you go

  Its rare that folks travel with out a map, even those in the outback have mental map of where they going (and its not like norman briggs from new york is doing the walk about, he would be croc food very quickly). So would you code before having any idea of what your doing? You must have at least have a vage idea, it needs to do XYZ but unless you know 100% what XYZ are then that means lots of room for movement on what XYZ is from your customer (could be your boss for example) and the time it took you to develop XYZ goes up and up each time XYZ changes and up and up Thats a costly business but at the the other end of the scale it be costly too. In some organizations, change control is a serious busines (windows start button any one ;-)) with lots of levels of consideration of impact (big design up front approaches can glue this in). In other organizations there is non, it just happens (ad-hoc). In others the methodology can flex to the requirements. What does this mean exactly? Well in the Read More... Posted Tuesday, June 12, 2007 8:15 PM from Andrew Stopford's Weblog | 0 Comments Filed under: Testing & Build Systems, General Software Development

• How much time did you spend in the debugger today?

  Here is a question, how much time did you spend in the debugger today? Lets say for a 10 hour project you spend on average 1 minute of every hour in the debugger. Of course this is a guess, if your writing code from scatch then you won't spend as often in the debugger as you aready have a mental node of where you need to set watches and breakpoints. Come back to that code in 6 months or debug someone elses code and you will be spending a lot longer trying to set breakpoints, stepping over/through etc. Even with user requirements helping point you in the right direction it will take time to figure out whats going on (and with out user requirements its even more puzzle solving time). Those that unit test there code, agile or otherwise will likely be saying I have spent less than a minute to no time at all in the debugger today. They will have had the inital hump of learning what the code is doing, but its likely a good set of user requirements and concrete set of tests allows them to zero Read More... Posted Monday, June 11, 2007 6:48 PM from Andrew Stopford's Weblog | 0 Comments Filed under: Testing & Build Systems, General Software Development

• Developer-Test, Tester-Developer

  Jeffery Palermo has a post on "(good) developers test so do testers develop?". My take on this is that most testers can't avoid writing code because a lot of testing requires customization (and even creation) of tools to meet your testing requirements. The amount of tweaking requires often requires you write code, any tester that does'nt go to these lengths either has a very rigid, static system to test or is uneffective at automating their testing. Microsoft and Google are mentioned in the posts and the fact there testing postions need coding ability and an understanding of code to test. I also noticed in the comments of one post that Jason Huggins has been hired at Google (which continues the recent trend at Google for hiring free and OSS test tool engineers) for those of you that don't know him he founded the Selenium functional web testing tool project at ThoughtWorks. Read More... Posted Thursday, February 15, 2007 7:57 AM from Andrew Stopford's Weblog | 0 Comments Filed under: Testing & Build Systems, General Software Development