Gojko Adzic

How do we sell the test-driven approach on a wider scale to business analysts and customers? How do we get them involved in that process? It seems that a lot of the problems and confusion obstructing that effort come out of the misleading name of the term “acceptance tests”.

Dan North suggests using the word “behaviour” instead of “test” to point out how acceptance tests express system behaviours. I found this approach very useful for describing the role of TDD to “outsiders”, who are not interested in low-level functional testing and tune out as soon as people start talking about anything related to testing, including Test-Driven Development. Dan writes: Continue Reading »

I’m building a new web site for DbFit and rewriting the documentation from scratch. For the new site, I would love to have some success stories and comments from people who are using the tool now. So if you are one of them, and you are happy with the tool, pretty please take a moment to write a short comment on what you are doing and how DbFit has helped you - one-liners are welcome as well. Please also ask your manager if I can mention your company name - I would like have a “who is using DbFit” page on the new web site as well. Click here for my contact information or just put the comment into the box below this post.

Thanks in advance.

Jeff Patton from Thoughtworks held a very interesting session at XpDay last month in London, focusing on a common misconception that causes “agile” projects to fall into the same trap that the waterfall ones typically do.

Incremental is not iterative

Using a very interesting combination of pop music and rock star images, Jeff Patton told a story of a failed agile project in his XpDay keynote “Embrace Uncertainty”. The project started off nicely, almost by the book, with customer involvement and stories split into iterations, based on what functionality is to be delivered in what release. After they got something delivered to play with, customers changed their minds (as they so often do) and new stories and features were introduced into the plan. After a few deliveries, the scope kept growing and growing instead of reducing. From the developer perspective everything worked as planned – customer was expanding the scope and developers are there to oblige, because that is the essence of agile practices. Spice Girl Mel B was used for the role of a developer writing user stories and losing all sight of the big picture (while “So tell me what you want, what you really really want” was playing in the background). For the customer, the thing simply did not work - iteration after iteration, they were not any closer to having the project done. Continue Reading »