Notes from a Tool User

Giving an Taking Design Criticism with Rebecca Wirfs-Brock

2009-06-25T11:31:55-04:00

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend a webinar “Giving and Taking Design Criticism” with Rebecca Wirfs-Brock. The session teaser was: “Have you ever engaged in a design review where people didn't play fair? Do you have trouble giving design advice that sticks? An effective software developer or designer needs to be skilled at giving, asking for, and reacting appropriately to criticism.”

As someone who has done design/code reviews – I’ve always wondered why the advice didn’t stick and needed to be repeated time after time. As the victim of the same reviews I wondered why the reviewer needed to be so picky and unpleasant ;-) Two sides of the same coin?

In this Webinar Rebecca reminded us of what is going on and gave us some tools to do better reviews and be better listeners. She talked about Cognitive Biases (an excellent list >75 biases) and their effect. Key take away: everyone brings a different set of biases to the table and they cause use to react rather “think and behave logically”.

Presenting

When presenting ideas keep the following biases in mind (some definitions from Wikipedia):

Confirmation Bias – the tendency to search for and interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions (Wikipedia). In addition people will avoid things that disconfirm their biases. To combat this bias, invite the people involved in the review to argue the other’s viewpoint for a while.
Sunken Costs or Loss Aversion – having sunk money into an expensive investment we’re reluctant to pull out of it. Counteract by telling the audience about the opportunity costs.
Hyperbolic discounting — the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs (Wikipedia). To counter break ideas into smaller pieces each with an immediate payoff.
Contrast Effect – people compare items/ideas against each other and not against a fixed standard. So compare against a lesser option first.
Increase Information Availability - people decide based on what they remember. Complex and uncomfortable information is easily forgotten. Recent, Vivid, Information is easier to remember. Think Garr Reynolds and Presentation Zen.
Ambiguity Effect – people favour options where there is a known probability vs. uncertain options.
Visualize Benefits – reviewers often need to tangibly perceive the benefits. Often a simple drawing (not a UML diagram, or code) can help compare two options.
Primacy and Recency Effects - people remember what they hear first and last.

Advice

Giving and receiving Advice:

Use a triage approach with: Recommendations, Suggestions and Observations. Allows you to share ideas and reduce the defensiveness of the recipient.
Comment on Good choices – reinforce things that the person is doing well.
Use Probing Questions: “are intended to help the presenter think more deeply about the issue at hand”. Examples: Are these ideas complete and accurate? Ask for examples? … (see Changing Minds for more).
Use Clarifying Questions: “are simple questions of fact. … The litmus test for a clarifying question is: Does the presenter have to think before s/he answers? If so, it’s almost certainly a probing question.” Examples: How long will this take? What resources does this require?

Faulty Reasoning

Finally Rebecca finished with a good recap of the reasoning fallacies (who knew that undergrad logic course would ever prove useful), among them:

Red Herring: Distracting with an irrelevancy.
Slippery Slope: Loosely connected statements with ridiculous conclusion.

All in all a very interesting session – I only wish it had been interactive and not passive so that we retained more of what we there to learn.

Rebecca’s recommended reading includes: Wikipedia for Cognitive Biases, Changing Minds, “How to Disagree” by Paul Graham and her own articles: “Giving Design Advice” and “Handling Design Criticism”.

Product Owner Video Up

2009-06-15T15:41:14-04:00

Paul Relf is a Scrum Product Owner at Nortel and one of the few people I’ve seen that really gets the role of product owner. In April he gave a presentation at Agile Ottawa that I missed, luckily for all of us Fred Dixon, recorded the presentation on video and the results are now up at the Code Factory: The Product Owner.

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Agile Mailing Lists

2009-06-08T11:44:10-04:00

Twitter is fun, c2.com is almost dead and blogs have a lot of great ideas, but the best discussions about Agile still occur on the mailing list. Yet I keep coming across people in interested in learning about Agile who don’t know about the mailing lists.

What follows is the mailing lists I know of (most of which I subscribe to). BTW I don’t recommend subscribing to this many mailing lists your mail volume will be insane (mine is about 300-400 messages a day), I can only handle it because gmail collapses long conversations into a single thread.

Basics

Scrum Development, ~6800 members, 500-700 messages a month. Description: “For updates and interchange betwen the users of Scrum and those just beginning to use Scrum. Restricted to those who want to build products and software using Scrum. For discussion on how to do so”. This list is a very good place to get started, it was my first Agile mailing list.

Extreme Programming, ~9200 members, 800-1000 message a month. Description: “The purpose of the list is civilized discussion of questions, issues, problems, and topics in Extreme Programming, Agile Methods, software development practices, and related topics.” I don’t participate in this list – only due to lack of time.

Agile Project Management, ~3600 members, 100-200 messages a month. Description: “Agile Project Management (APM) is a group to discuss and promote techniques for the management of agile projects. APM seeks to provide managers with a forum to share practical advice, experiences and insights from the application of agile methodologies like eXtreme Programming (XP), SCRUM, Feature Driven Development (FDD) and DSDM.” I like this list part because it attracts a different crowd than Scrum Development: Sanjiv Augustine, David Schmaltz, Hillel Glazer

Crystal Clear, ~200 members, <50 messages a month, Description: “Discussion of the Crystal Methodologies (Alistair Cockburn).” Low volume, high quality – most posts are of interest. Something happened in the four years since I joined, apparently the list is invite only, you have to bug Alistair @ crystalclear-owner@yahoogroups.com.

Lean, Kanban and the Edge

Lean Software Development, ~1400 members, 100-200 messages a month, Description: The name says it all.

Lean Agile, ~1400 members, 200-300 messages a month, Description: “For discussing how to learn, apply and evangelicize Lean-Agile Software Development and/or Scrum, TDD, TOC, Kanban, ... within the context of Lean.” Started originally as LeanAgileScrum by Allan Shalloway after he was kicked off the ScrumDevelopment mailing list. Very similar discussions to “Lean Software Development”, it strikes as odd that the two haven’t merged.

Kanban, ~700 members, 200-400 messages a month, Description: “An opportunity to discuss and learn more about the use of virtual Kanban systems in software development. Kanban has become popular throughout 2008. The main proponents are David Anderson, Corey Ladas, Karl Scotland, Aaron Sanders, Kenji Hiranabe (and with his Naked Planning approach) Arlo Belshee. Kanban started with David J. Anderson and his work at Microsoft and Corbis in Seattle. See Kanban in Action and From Worst to Best in 9 Months for further details. Corey Ladas has also published extensively at his Lean Software Enginnering blog.” Small group lots of very interesting discussion.

Real Options, ~100 members, <100 messages a month, Description: “Discussion of the application of options outside the world of finance. Whether people realise it or not, "freedom to choose" is the underlying principle behind many of the agile practices. We call this principle Real Options. An understanding of Real Options allows us to develop and refine new agile practices and take agile into directions it hasn't gone before. Real Options also help us understand why some people resist some of the practices.”

Agile Business, ~50 members, <50 messages a month, Description: “This group is a place for people interested in the business side of Agile. It is for customers, Product Owners, business analysts, Product Management, Product Development, executives, marketing and all those interested in those concerns (which should also include everyone doing lean or agile).Agile and Lean are interpreted broadly (i.e., the scope is much broader than just agile software development). Examples of breadth: How to get my car repair shop more agile, what would it mean to have lean delivery in a church, Can non-SW projects use an agile approach; what does that mean”. This group is brand new

Agile Beyond Software, ~80 members, <50 messages a month, Description: “This is a group for people who are interested in sharing stories, experiences, practices, and questions about applying agile beyond software. This could be in management, marketing, engineering, small business, personal life, community groups, or any other areas where you think it might be worth trying!!!”. Still trying to sort out the difference between this and Agile Business – although both Joe and Mishkin insist they do differ.

Solo Scrum, ~50 members, <50 messages a month, Description: “Group for investigating and sharing agile approaches (lean, scrum, etc) and engineering practices for better developing software on your own.” I only just joined the group.

Agile Articles, 570 members, < 20 messages a month, Description: “The Agile Articles group was founded in order to, gather links to: online papers, recommended books, agile websites, open source tools”

Techniques

Agile Testing, ~5400 members, 200-300 messages a month, Description: “In this group, we discuss how to test software in projects that are using an Agile style of development.
We expect most members of the group to be independent testers working on an agile team. However, we're open to discussions of other types of agile testing: developer testing, customer acceptance testing, and so forth.” I like the groups practical focus leaving the majority of the philosophical debate to other lists.

Retrospectives, ~370 members, <100 members a month, Description: “Retrospective Facilitators Community”. Low volume, very insightful.

Software Craftsmanship, ~660 members, ~100-400 messages a month, Description: “Discuss what Software Craftmanship is and how to promote it. Effectively a response of Uncle Bob’s Crap Code keynote at Agile 2008”.

Automated Acceptance Functional Testing Tool, ~300 members, < 100 messages a month. Description:” This discussion group is for discussions related to advances in functional testing tools for Agile projects … The good news is that tool support for automated functional tests has grown significantly in recent years. There is a large variety of commercial and open source testing tools/frameworks available that support Agile development practices. … However, we believe that it’s time for another significant boost to the state of the art. We'll discuss those advances here.”

Test Driven Development, ~4500 members, 200 – 300 messages a month. The name says it all.

Test First User Interfaces, ~700 members, few postings in the past few years, Description: “discuss writing Graphic User Interfaces using Test Driven Development techniques”. Come by and restart the conversation.

Refactoring, ~3900 members, < 100 messages a month, Description: “This is a forum for discussions about Refactoring, including tools associated with Refactoring. It is a place to share and discuss new and old refactorings in a variety of software languages.” Hard to believe a forum I’m not subscribed to.

Lean Programming, ~300 members, <50 messages a month, Description: “This group is a place for all conversations relating to the production of code - including test, code and design. Topics such as test-driven-development, emergent design, design patterns, code quality, and anything related are welcome. This user group was formed by several technical trainers and coaches of Net Objectives who are active on the site, however, it is open to all.” Another one I didn’t know about until I started this post.

Agile Embedded, ~190 members, < 20 messages a month, Description: “The Agile Embedded group is interested in using agile techniques such as extreme programming and scrum to develop embedded software.” Another mailing list I didn’t know.

Tools

There are a lot more lists related to tools than I mention here, these are just the tools I use today. There are lots of other tool related mailing lists out there.

JUnit, ~7600 members, 100-200 messages a month, Description – just like the name says.

NUnit, ~270 members, 100-300 messages a month. Description: “The primary support list for NUnit as well as the place where we discuss new approaches, features and bugs. As such, it replaces the previous nunit-users and nunit-developers lists on SourceForge.”

Fitnesse, ~2900 members, 200-300 messages a month, Description: “FIT (Framework for Integration Testing) fit.c2.com; FitNesse -- a collaborative testing tool based upon fit. http://fitnesse.org”

CCNET, ~1380 members, 300-400 messages a month, Description: “Mailling list for users of CruiseControl.NET. Please submit support requests to this list”

Win Tech Off Topic, ~1700 members, 100-200 messages a month, Description: “This mailing list is for all the Off Topic messages from all of the other Windows-centric technical mailing lists I belong to, i.e. ATL, DCOM, DOTNET and GENX. These messages are typically marked [OT], [OOT], [VERY OT], or whatever. Sometimes this seems like most of the content on these lists, and often the most interesting, but since it's "off topic", folks are often flamed for their posts.” This list doesn’t have an Agile focus but is still one of the best places to ask technical windows programming questions.

Jobs and Announcements

Agile Announcements, 600 members, < 100 messages a month. Description: “This group is for Agile Announcements. The announcements can be about user groups meetings, job postings, service offerings, course, or whatever. And any discussion about announcements posted. The geographic scope is worldwide.” Oddly enough reading user group announcements from around the world is interesting. It gives me great ideas for Agile Ottawa.

Agile Jobs, ~250 members, <20 messages a month.

XP Jobs – ~1700 members, <20 messages a month.

Local

There are over a hundred local Agile mailing lists, I’m located in Ottawa so I will only mention these two: Agile Ottawa, Agile Programming Ottawa – for some strange reason we have two Agile Ottawa mailing lists. Nuts.

Other

Mailing lists for all of my personal productivity tools.

My Life Organized, ~2320 members, 200-300 messages a month, Description: “A tree based task management tool that generates to do lists for you”. I reviewed this tool nearly three years ago now.

Do It Tomorrow, ~680 members, <50 members, Description: “This group was established as an informal place for members of other time management groups, not to mention those new to time management/productivity methods, to discuss the time management methodologies put forward in the books of author and coach Mark Forster.” I’ve tried GTD and failed at it. DIT seems to suit my personal style.

Pomodoro Technique, ~200 members, <50 messages a month, Description: “The aim of this discussion group is to help users of the Pomodoro Technique to get to know it better to use it more effectively. Whether you are new to Pomodoro Technique or a veteran reply to the topic” This is the technique that helps keep me (and many other agilists) focused during the day.

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GAC Madness

2009-05-11T10:59:00-04:00

Using FxCop when I try to analyze projects that rely on Patterns and Practices, Enterprise Library Data (among others) 2.0.0.0 - FxCop complains that it can’t: “Locate Assembly Reference” - even though the application dll being analyzed was complied against this version and its in the GAC. If I browse to the GAC try to select the same assembly (I've checked version and public key token) FxCop won't allow me "open" it. The application succeeds in running and definitely makes use of the problem dll.

OS: Seen on both Vista and Windows XP.
Versions: Visual Studio 2005 and 2008. FxCop 1.36

I have the same problem if I try to browse the application dll with Reflector.

Clearly it doesn't think this is the same version of the assembly its compiled against. Does anyone know why? Any suggestions for a solution? What am I missing?

Solution (via StackOverflow): "In FxCop, you can select Project - Options... - Spelling & Analysis - (check) Search Global Assembly Cache for missing references"

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Visual Studio vs. CCNET as Service

2009-04-07T16:20:11-04:00

Ok I’m going completely mad with CCNET and Visual Studio 2005. We’ve got CCNET running from the command line – but wanted to migrate to running it as a service so that it would always be run after a machine restart. The service has the login credentials of the user that runs the command line version today. So in theory they’re the same people.

The ccnet config file:

<cruisecontrol>
 <project name="EndManager" webURL="http://localhost/EndManager">
  <intervalTrigger name="continuous" seconds="30"/>
  <sourcecontrol type="vss">
   <project>$/EndorsementManager_Net</project>
   <workingDirectory>C:\GLOBEXDOTNETVSS\ENDORSEMENTMANAGER_NET</workingDirectory>
   <timeout units="seconds">600</timeout>
   <ssdir>\\vss2\share2\GlobexDotNet</ssdir>
  </sourcecontrol>
  <tasks>
   <devenv solutionfile="C:\GLOBEXDOTNETVSS\ENDORSEMENTMANAGER_NET\Source\EndorsementMgr.sln" configuration="debug" />
   <nunit path="C:\Program Files\NUnit 2.4.8\bin\nunit-console.exe">
    <assemblies>
     <assembly>C:\GLOBEXDOTNETVSS\ENDORSEMENTMANAGER_NET\Source\EndmBaLayer\EndmBaComponentUnitTest\bin\Debug\EndmBaComponentUnitTest.dll</assembly>
    </assemblies>
   </nunit>  
  </tasks>
 </project>
</cruisecontrol>

This contains the much maligned devenv task which we use because its easier than writing an msbuild script for all of the assemblies. The devenv task trys to do the following on the command line:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\devenv.com "C:\GLOBEXDOTNETVSS\ENDORSEMENTMANAGER_NET\Source\EndorsementMgr.sln" /rebuild "debug"

Net result – I get the following wonderfully descriptive error: “the application data folder for visual studio could not be created” What’s up? Is this an environment variable problem? Shouldn’t having the login credentials of the user mean that we get their environment variables?

Any ideas?

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Planning a Change in Career? Laid Off?

2009-04-06T09:18:47-04:00

Recently a few good friends have been laid off and I’ve been left thinking what to do after that happens. First up I don’t have any jobs in my back pocket. I don’t know anyone hiring right this second. My thoughts are more general than that.

First even if you haven’t been laid off I would start preparing now, my advice is around building your profile and being prepared for whatever happens. This is also the pretty much exactly what I did in the past few years as I started thinking about moving from day to day software development to a full time Agile Coaching role.

My focus build your personal profile so that people will know you and think of you when they have a problem to solve. My approach to achieving that – provide service and value to others – good things will flow from there. So although the goal is create your personal brand I think the best way to do it is thinking what other people will find valuable.

My Strategies

Get an email address with your own domain name. Having hotmail/yahoo/gmail address just looks unprofessional. Domain names are cheap and you can alias your domain to a google apps or any other acct. It just looks better.
Start a blog. Don’t use blogger – it looks cheap, pick something where you control the look and feel – typepad and wordpress are both great choices. Focus on quality and value, not frequency. BTW Use feedburner from the start if you ever migrate it will save a ton of hassles.
Find your local Agile group (Scrum Community PBwiki has some). Start attending meetings. Ask relevant questions, become known, become a speaker.
Find an Agile mailing list (or two) that is of interest to you (Scrum Development, Agile Testing, TDD, …) start answering questions (when you have something of value to add).
Start twittering, I’m: http://twitter.com/mlevison – if you look through the list of people I’m following you will find many of the interesting people in the agile community. Also search on “agile” and you will see interesting conversations float by. I use tweetdeck as my tool.
Try LinkedIn – yes I’ve dissed it before but you might get something from it I haven’t. My LinkedIn profile.

Remember your focus is helping other people. Do that and they will pay you back in spades. It may take a while but eventually it will. In my case it took about two years but in the end it helped me land my ideal job: Coaching Agile teams.

Image Credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com used under CC license

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Urlseek.vmn.net or the Evil that is Hidden in Toolbars

2009-03-31T09:28:25-04:00

A few weeks ago I need to capture the output of a program in the form of a PDF. A few minutes googling led me to PDF Creator (hosted at SourceForge). The application itself is great however when you install it a toolbar is bundled with it pdfforge. You don’t get an option its simply installed on your behalf – as ‘benefit’. The worst parts of the license agreement are below:

1.1 Rights You Grant to Spigot.
By installing the Toolbar on your computer, you expressly authorize and request Spigot to:
a) act as your search agent to conduct inquiries on your behalf using Spigot's search engine and technologies and partners' sites, and collect relevant information and display it to you;
b) take actions Spigot deems appropriate to provide the Toolbar to you and to act on your behalf in obtaining information from partners and displaying that to you;
c) read and interpret your search requests and results on certain sites and use this information to conduct searches on your behalf, offer alternative results and to personalize The Toolbar for you;
…

f) modify your Microsoft Internet Explorer and/or Mozilla Firefox browser settings for the default search engine, address bar search, "DNS error" page, "404 error" page, and new tab page to facilitate more informative responses as determined by The Toolbar;
…

The real offender here is stealing 404 error pages. At my current client my wireless internet connection is sometimes less than perfect and when I ‘404’ errors I was redirected to Urlseek’s obnoxious website (sorry I won’t link to this crap). Some digging proves that you can uninstall the toolbar separately from the PDF creator, but even so this is low underhanded and unpleasant. In addition I suspect Sourceforge would be a little unhappy to hear that this nastiness is hosted on their site.

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Reviewing the Review Process for Agile 2009

2009-03-25T09:43:28-04:00

Sorry I’ve been more than a bit busy lately, working as an independent coach is very rewarding and time consuming. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been doing work reviewing sessions for the Manifesting Agility Stage at Agile2009: “This Stage is all about tools and techniques for rapidly developing a deep understanding of the empirical Agile mindset, and then rapidly applying it—as individuals, and as groups.” As a you can imagine even with only 87 proposals this is a very time consuming process. Our stage has 1440 minutes allotted and 3750 minutes of proposals.

Its been hard work, first up in theory we should provide every proposal a proper review even if its only a few sentences. While I tried that and I was able to provide comments (visible to the public) or reviews (visible only to the author and other reviewers) – I commented on or reviewed 50+ sessions (across all the stages). Sorry too everyone who’s session didn’t get a review. There are only three of us who are actually doing the work on this stage and we just can’t provide notes to all of you. Consider these notes your comments.

My number one discovery many proposal authors aren’t providing enough detail for either me or the attendees. Consider for me a reviewer I need to decide why to give you a chunk of our tiny stage. I need to see what the subject is, how you will present it. You need to sell. I need to understand how you will present – will it be a straight talk? will there be an interactive session? What will the interactive session be etc.? The longer your proposed session the more you need to sell. For a 45 minute experience report you can say less – but if you expect 90 minutes or even 180 you had better be clear and I need to see what value people will get. If its just a straight talk and its 90 minutes long what can you tell me about why audience will sit and listen for the whole time. People I seen present before will have an easier time here – I know that Mary Poppendieck can be very captivating even when she’s just reading slides. The rest of us are not. I know that Jean Tabaka always has engaging and interesting sessions.

If you asked for 180 minutes – we had 17 proposals of that length, but each will consume 1/8th of our stage budget. For something this long it had better be amazing especially since attendees will have to contend with some of their workshop partners leaving halfway through. We had 4-5 that would all be amazing but for the time constraints can only pick one.

Experience Reports: “captures the story of a real agile project, summarizing what happened on the project and the key learning points” – these are generally 45 minutes long so when you propose a 90 minute experience we want to know why will the audience sit that long to hear your story. This really is a case of less is more.

Also remember what you write in your proposal not only has to sell the reviewers it also has to sell the attendees. This is all they will have to decide whether your session will be a exciting or a snooze.

Mechanics

Onto the mechanics and my discoveries. First I liked last years approach with the whole community being able to vote on sessions and using the wisdom of crowds for best to be found. However I gather there were problems, in some cases authors had their friends vote up their sessions thereby gaming the system. In addition a system like that means that the more well known a person the better their sessions will do. So Jeff S. and Mary P. will get their sessions voted up almost no matter what they write. Whereas completed unknowns had a much tougher time. This years system while harder work for the reviewers at least levels the playing ground a bit. Hopefully we will find a more elegant approach in future years.

On the whole the submission system with reviews and comments has worked fairly well, but here’s what I wish were different.

Authors need to know that proposals are being reviewed/commented and that replies/updates are a critical part of the acceptance process.
Authors need to be notified when a comment/review is added.
People who write comments/reviews need to know when replies are made
RSS is not the the only notification system some of use still prefer email.
The difference between comments and reviews needs to be made more clear.
“Browse session proposals” page needs to display the length of the sessions. It makes it easier to make decisions if we know their length.
Proposal database should exportable to spreadsheet. A web page is handy but once the hard work begins it would be alot easier if I could just work in Excel or even Google Docs.
I don’t want recommendations visible to the proposal author. These are often friends and colleagues who I want to work with again. This maybe true today but I can’t tell.
…

I realize alot of work has gone into making a usable submission system and my suggestions just create more but these would help the authors by knowing what matters next year and the reviewers by reducing the burden. I also understand that many great sessions won’t get accepted because not enough detail was provided.

Next blog posting will be back on track with something of more interest to most.

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Functional/Acceptance Test Tools for Web Apps

2009-02-10T12:46:32-05:00

I used to be rich client guy, but my current client is building web apps and so all of a sudden I'm a web app guy. Now I wish I’d paid more attention in the past. For my penance I promise to document whatever I learn on the forthcoming Agile Tools Functional Test Wiki (i.e. the wiki that we discussed last year at the AA-FTT meeting before A2008).

My client is building an ASP .NET application and we're trying to decide how to test it. The issues I have to deal with:

The two QA people have no coding experience so any tool that requires significant coding will require more development support.
The application will be run in IE on the IIS webserver. No other combinations need be tested.
The application is really a document creation and management system. Once the documents have been created and approved they're submitted to an outside system.

My discoveries so far (via this list and the opensourcetesting.com) and some follow-up questions
Tools:

Selenium seems to be written about the most although some users complain about slowness and less than intuitive api.
Watin (now supports firefox) api seems to be well liked - but assertions have to be written in manually i.e. in code.
Apodora - never heard of this tool before. From Open Source Testing: "Apodora is a framework/tool for automating functional testing of web applications. It provides the user with programmatic control of the web browser allowing them to interact directly with the browser's user interface. It uses a database backend in order to remember how to find your html elements. This also makes your scripts easier to maintain."
FitNesse .NET - not entire convinced that the application is well suited to FitNesse style tests. But the team will make the decision. I really think I need to read chunks of Gojko's first book before passing any real judegement.
Canoo WebTests - xml may be hard for customers and non programmers to write. Am I missing the point?
Concordian – seems like a clever idea that will create a lot of work for developers.

Frameworks/IDEs

Robot Framework - “Robot Framework is a generic keyword-driven test automation framework for acceptance level testing and acceptance test-driven development (ATDD). It has an easy-to-use tabular syntax for creating test cases and its testing capabilities can be extended by test libraries implemented either with Python or Java. Users can also create new keywords from existing ones using the same simple syntax that is used for creating test cases.”
CubicTest – an Eclipse Based IDE for Selenium, promises “…It makes web tests faster and easier to write, and provides abstractions to make tests more robust and reusable.”
StoryTestIQ - “STIQ is a mashup of Selenium and FitNesse. It is "wiki-ized" Selenium with widgets and features that make it easier to write and organize Selenium tests.”

Questions

Selenium

Are the problems with Selenium slowness, need to insert delays after entering text and less than intitutive api real? (http://adamesterline.com/2007/04/23/watin-watir-and-selenium-reviewed/, http://www.testdrivendeveloper.com/2008/07/22/ComparingWatiNAndSeleniumForUITesting.aspx, http://hammett.castleproject.org/?p=120, ).
Do you spend more time debugging the tests than finding real problems?
Is Jay on the money is his positioning of Selenium: http://blog.jayfields.com/2008/07/immaturity-of-in-browser-testing.html “Selenium is best used by developers or testers when testing the most valuable (to the business) happy paths of a Javascript heavy web application that must function in several browsers”

Watin

Does it support dialogs now?
Does it suffer the same slowness problems as Selenium?
Is it as hard to use with IE as Selenium can be?
Is it compatible with Robot Framework?

If you’re using Selenium are you using any wrapper framework/IDE?

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Manifesting Agile Stage - wants proposals

2009-01-29T17:08:52-05:00

Our stage at Agile 2009 wants your proposals. The name is a little obscure and some people are having a hard time deciding if their talk belongs there. Here's the deal: "This Stage is all about tools and techniques for rapidly developing a deep understanding of the empirical Agile mindset, and then rapidly applying it—as individuals, and as groups. We are looking for hard-hitting sessions focused on enabling immediate understanding and effective application of the Agile approach."

Among the types of sessions we're looking for are:

Cognition and Psychology- techniques and tools that develop awareness and cognition of real Agile thinking at the individual and group levels. Also subject matter on group dynamics and group psychology. This includes material on behavioral topics such as belief change, cognitive psychology, and group-level dynamics and behavior.
Learning and Education- effective classroom and experiential learning techniques that manifest a real embrace of Agile’s core and essential concepts. Experience reports are of particular interest here. We are looking for sessions on best practices in Agile education and learning.
Applying Agile to non-IT Domains- Agile, empirical techniques are effective in many non-IT situations. We are actively seeking experience reports and sessions on how and where real Agile techniques are being applied effectively OUTSIDE of IT. We are looking for hard-hitting material on the use of Agile techniques in the domains of business, academia, non-profit organizations, and other places outside of IT where people organize to do work.

Among the sessions proposed so far: Learning: the best approaches for your brain (my own with Linda Rising), Scrum in Church: Saving the World One Team at a Time, Journeyman Tours: How Apprentices Hit the Road, ... (N.B. you need to create an account on the conference website to see and comment on the proposals).

So beat the rush, submit before Feb 13th (the hard deadline) and give the stage reviewers (like me) the time to comment on your proposal. The sooner it arrives the more feedback you will get.

See you in Chicago.

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