It’s been four years since – sadly – Gerald M. “Jerry” Weinberg passed away. Ever since then, I struggled with some public mourning about him, until recently I had just the right idea. On a weekly basis, I will publish a review of a book I read that Jerry either wrote himself or is about some of his work. Today, I picked the classic The Secrets of Consulting – A guide to giving & getting advice successfully published by Dorset House in 1985.
I recall when I read the #noestimates book, there was a concept that felt strange to me – and it still does. Without spoiling too much, at one point the concept of running, tested feature (RTF) is introduced. Let’s explore my thoughts together.
Continue reading What worried me about running, tested featuresSometimes while reading along song lyrics, I get some silly inspiration. One of these days, recently I listened to Let there by Rock by AC/DC and got the following idea for an Agile version of the lyrics.
Continue reading Agile Songs – Let there by ScrumIt’s been four years since – sadly – Gerald M. “Jerry” Weinberg passed away. Ever since then, I struggled with some public mourning about him, until recently I had just the right idea. On a weekly basis, I will publish a review of a book I read that Jerry either wrote himself or is about some of his work. Today, I picked the classic The Psychology of Computer Programming in its Silver Anniversary Edition from 1998, the original being published in 1971.
I found this old draft blog entry while going through some older blog entries. Since this has been laying around for many years now, I figured, it should be time to publish it now. Enjoy.
A couple of years ago Michael Bolton started a blog series on testing and management mistakes, to which I contributed four follow-up blog entries with an introduction, replacing blaming with placating, congruent responses, and causes. All of this was based on a single psychological model, or better, my understanding of it after having read through most of Jerry Weinberg’s work.
Recently I started to dive into some topics in psychology. While working through work from Schulz von Thun, I remembered this series when I crossed the idea of the inner team. I decided to revisit the original conversation and discuss it in the light of the inner team.
Schulz von Thun describes the inner team as a collective of personalities that each of us develops and carries with us. In any conversation, we face the struggle of forces for or against an argument. We also have a team leader, which could be stronger developed with some of us, or weaker, thereby yielding to different responses – sometimes even incongruent ones depending on the inner team member that cries the loudest at any given time.
Let’s revisit the conversation of the project manager asking a tester to work over the weekend, and take a closer look at the inner team within this tester.
Continue reading Testing and Management Mistakes: The Inner TeamThis week I had a conversation with several coaches at a client on something I consider pretty basic Agile knowledge, actually. To collect my thoughts together, I think it would be good practice to write all of them down for the time being. The topic at hand deals with test automation and enabling release-at-will through a zero-bug policy and how to get there. I think it’s going to be a brief blog entry, but fear my thoughts might run away there. So, stay with me.
Continue reading “Our release process pains us”It’s been four years since – sadly – Gerald M. “Jerry” Weinberg passed away. Ever since then, I struggled with some public mourning about him, until recently I had just the right idea. On a weekly basis, I will publish a review of a book I read that Jerry either wrote himself or is about some of his work. Today, I picked An Introduction to General Systems Thinking in its 25th-anniversary edition published by Dorset House Publishing in 2001, the original being published in 1975.
Back in 2011, I approached Rob Lambert at the Software Testing Club on a small series, packed into a narrative format as I wanted to try that out. Rob decided to run that series on the Software Testing Club back then, and I had some fun writing it. Skip forward 11 years, and the Software Testing Club no longer exists, it’s been a while since I have been in touch with Rob, yet I figured, let’s see how this series aged over the years. In the past weeks, I published all eight chapters here. If you want to catch up on them, here is a list:
Today, I will share my reflection after reading through all of them 11 years later. So, find my thought below.
Continue reading The Deliberate Tester – A reflectionRe-visiting so many of Jerry Weinberg’s books in the past couple of weeks has made me realize some lessons I merely had on the back burner in my mind, waiting to be activated. One of these learnings is the Causation Fallacy, best illustrated by this funny video:
It’s been four years since – sadly – Gerald M. “Jerry” Weinberg passed away. Ever since then, I struggled with some public mourning about him, until recently I had just the right idea. On a weekly basis, I will publish a review of a book I read that Jerry either wrote himself or is about some of his work. Today, we are going to take a look at what I consider the first book in Jerry’s seminal series on managing quality software: Quality Software Management Volume 4 – Anticipating Change published by Dorset House Publishing in 1997.
