Category Archives: Methodologies

Methodologies

XP Days Germany 2010: Scrum Norris

At the XP Days Germany 2010 I presented a Pecha Kucha about Scrum Norris, initially a blog post merely collecting Chuck Norris for Agile software development initiated by some of my colleagues from it-agile. Here is the translated transcription of that talk with the pictures included as well. As I missed to mention this during my talk, take this write-up as an over-sketched situation, and see if you can find Chuck Norris in your project as well. Oh, and take it with humor if you find out that you’re Chuck Norris in your project.

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The Wandering Book

Enrique Comba-Riepenhausen set up The Wandering Book over a year ago in order to capture the Zeitgeist of the Software Craftsmanship movement. It took me some time to realize what this book is going to be about, so that I finally signed up for the Wandering Book on the end of July 2009. After more than one year waiting for the book to arrive here, I played with my thoughts on what to write into it. During the last week the book arrived, and here are my thoughts, that I wrote in there.

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All of this is Software Craftsmanship, too

Over the course of the past week, I have been made aware about the perception what Software Craftsmanship is about. I asked two persons about their perception on Software Craftsmanship, and I got similar responses: The public perception seems to be that Craftsmanship is all about code, katas, and Coding Dojos. Unfortunately this is quite not all that is to Software Craftsmanship, and here is what I think anyone talking about Software Craftsmanship should be aware about.

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Software G Forces – The Effects of Acceleration

At a local talk in Hamburg, Kent Beck talked about G Forces in software, and what effects acceleration of the software process has. With regards to Continuous Deployment he talked about scaling up the deployment cycle from annually to a deployment cycle within minutes.

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Professionalism

Inspired by a Tweet from Jason Gorman I had to look up the definition of professionalism in my MacBook Pro. Amazingly I found the following:

the competence or skill expected of a professional : the key to quality and efficiency is professionalism.
• the practicing of an activity, esp. a sport, by professional rather than amateur players : the trend toward professionalism.

Let’s discuss this in the light of testing and Software Craftsmanship.

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Productive Partnerships

Today I crossed the path of a blog post on Why should we care about software craftsmanship. It’s basically a two part blog entry from Gael Fraiteur who visited the Software Craftsmanship conference in London, and reflected afterwards back on what Software Craftsmanship is to him, and where he sees problems with the notion of the term heavily influenced by a talk from David Harvey called Danger – Software Craftsmen at Work. Uncle Bob Martin wrote an excellent reply to the concerns here, which I won’t repeat. From my perspective there is one important argument missing: on customers, business representatives, and project stakeholders. That said, I agree to everything from Uncle Bob, but here is what I would add.

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Testing Craftsmanship

At the Agile Testing Days I led a small session at the Open Space day on the relevance of craftsmanship with testing. Simon Schrijver and Zeger van Hese provided me their feedback on the Software Craftsmanship Manifesto as well as the Ethics we came up shortly after publishing the manifesto. When the momentum for this discussion seemed to decrease, the expected unexpected within Open Space session happened. Here is my summary and my thoughts on it.

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What you always wanted to know about Testing and Quality Assurance – Testing as a profession

Last week I attended the CONQUEST 2010 conference. As I was invited to be part of an experts panel, I answered some questions from the conference attendees about testing, quality, and how all of this works. In particular I was invited as an expert on Agile testing. The session was voice recorded, in order for the transcript to be provided online in a few weeks. Since it will be on German and we had to restrict our answers to two minutes, I asked the organizers, Karin Vosseberg and Andreas Spillner, whether I may translate the questions to English and publish them on my blog, and got the permission to do so. So, this is the first set of questions (from the CONQUEST 2010 attendees) and answers (from myself). The first set of questions is filed under the topic “Testing as a profession”.

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