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Lisa Crispin explains in this article how CI has become an absolute necessity for any software development team in this day and age. For those who have yet to fully embrace CI, this article gives you some great reasons you should, along with some helpful resources to get you started.
In this article, Lisa Crispin recalls a time when testers alone were solely responsible for software quality, and compares that to more modern thinking where collaboration between developers and testers is king. Software quality is everyone's job, sometimes it takes independence to get there.
Lisa Crispin explains how being nice goes a lot further than just displaying good manners; it can be the difference between a happy, productive team, and one that's completely dysfunctional and prone to failure. Learn how she's discovered this on past projects and how you can avoid the same pitfall.
For those who believe there has to be one right way to do something, especially in software development - there can be. But that one way isn't likely to come from a single individual. Through collaboration and teamwork, some of the greatest single ideas have evolved.
Lisa Crispin dives into the "we're all in the same boat" theory and explains how it can't be more true in the software development world. From the need for common goals to going beyond taking responsibility for the team's actions, each team must know that you're going to fail or succeed together.
Giving your customers the opportunity to provide feedback is great, but only if you don't fall into one of the four traps that Naomi Karten describes in this article. Let your customers know that not only do you want their feedback, but that you'll actually use the important info they give you.
One of the practices recommended by Extreme Programming (XP) is to keep a ten-minute build. Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres write in Extreme Programming Explained (Second Edition): "Automatically build the whole system and run all of the tests in ten minutes. A build that takes longer than ten minutes will be used much less often, missing the opportunity for feedback."
So what do you do when your build takes longer than ten minutes?
Continuous Integration build tools are great: they help us ensure our product works after every commit, keep historical data and metrics, build our product for all target environments, and do many more useful things. But there's one key aspect that often gets overlooked: They're fun.
Few things are more rewarding than working in a job that you love.
Kay Johansen has collected a list of "Top Ten Reasons to Love Agile Testing", which she's shared with the agile-testing mailing list. It's inspirational and motivating to hear people who are passionate about their work talk about why they love their jobs.
There are a wealth of open source and commercial tools available to help us build software. However, sometimes we get stuck using tools in ways that are not optimal for our project. In these cases, investing some time to make the tools work for us can make substantial improvements in productivity.
Today I watched an old TED Talk by Dr. Hans Rosling entitled "Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen." If you haven't seen it yet, I recommend taking a moment to watch it - I've never seen statistics presented in such an engaging and entertaining fashion. In this talk, Dr. Rosling uses his fantastic visualization software to demonstrate the changing relation between the wealth and health of nations over several decades.
My colleague Steve Berczuk recently pointed me to the O'Reilly 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know project, and I've been digesting little bits and pieces from it ever since. This project is a community-contributed set of short essays that will ultimately be culled into an O'Reilly book edited by Kevlin Henney. At the time I'm writing this, there are 88 entries selected and edited for the book.
Good names make a design easy to understand, help clarify intent, and provide inspiration. But those perfect names can be a real struggle to discover. In his book Implementation Patterns, Kent Beck writes: "Finding just the right name is one of the most satisfying moments in programming."
I was pretty convinced I was having a dream this morning. Everything seemed fairly routine: coffee, breakfast, and the crisp air of a September morning. I paged through an e-mail summary of the headlines from The New York Times, made a mental note to read the story about the effects of eradicating all the pigs from Egypt, and settled in to read an article about pair programming.
If getting together in a room with a small group of software professionals and having deep discussions about design and testing sounds like your idea of a good time, and you'll be in the Northeast next weekend, I've got the perfect conference for you: The Simple Design and Testing Conference.
OK, that may have sounded like a silly introduction, but I'm one of those people who think it sounds like a good time, and if you're still reading this, chances are you are too. Here's the scoop:
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