Gojko Adzic

While doing research for my new book, I was very surprised to find out that Jim Shore gave up on acceptance testing. I use his “describe-demonstrate-develop” process description all the time in my workshops, so I guess I better stop doing that. Jim Shore wrote:

My experience with Fit and other agile acceptance testing tools is that they cost more than they’re worth. There’s a lot of value in getting concrete examples from real customers and business experts; not so much value in using “natural language” tools like Fit and similar.

The two failure patterns that Shore describes in his post are falling back on testers to write everything and merging acceptance and integration tests. I’ve experienced both of these myself, and it seems that they are common in general. We discussed both during the top 10 ways to fail with acceptance testing openspace session at CITCON Europe last year. However, there are good ways to solve both problems. Continue Reading »

The idea of the example-writing workshop to support acceptance testing seems to cause a lot of confusion and misunderstanding, at least judging from my two most recent talks and the questions during the discussion at the second Alt.NET UK conference. A lot of people seem to somehow contrast that to iterative development and mistake the workshop for big design up-front, expecting that it will increase the feedback loop. To resolve the misunderstanding, here is an example of how the workshop (and acceptance testing) fits into an agile process to shorten the feedback loop and improve iterative development. Continue Reading »

I’m currently reading Exploring Requirements: Quality Before Design by Donald Gause and Gerald Weinberg. The book was written twenty years ago but it is still spot-on, which is really incredible for a software-development related book. Gause and Weinberg described an experiment from one of their workshops that was supposed to show how even the simplest things can cause a lot of misunderstanding. I honestly could not believe the results, so I decided to repeat it yesterday. The outcome absolutely amazed me. Continue Reading »

James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, gave a keynote speech today at the first day of Agile 2008 conference in Toronto. His talk was about how to harness the collective intelligence better and what conditions have to be met for teams to be more intelligent than any single individual in the team. Continue Reading »

Misunderstandings caused by wrong assumptions or supposedly self-evident knowledge are, in my opinion, among the biggest obstacles to great software. Developers and business people can have a great time talking to each other, agree on everything and still understand two completely different things. Problems like that will not cause a project to get cancelled, the stuff that gets delivered may work, but its going to fall short of doing the right thing. Instead of being great, the result is just going to be mediocre and it will need rework so that the clients can really use it. One of the worst examples of how people can agree on everything and still make a major mistake does not come from software at all — it can be heard on a river boat trip. Continue Reading »