One of my colleagues made a claim yesterday which I would like to put some numbers on. I raised the question on twitter, and received suspicious answers about the numbers of my colleague. Please forward this survey to anyone you know who is programming: http://www.shino.de/programmer-survey/ It consist of just four question, so you should be able to answer them in a few minutes.
Over twitter I also received the feedback that things are worse for testers. I would like to put numbers on that as well. Therefore I also put up an equally small survey for tester: http://www.shino.de/tester-survey/ Please forward this survey to anyone in the software business that you know of.
From time to time to I will publish some of the results. I aim for end of January for the first set of data.
Mission: Test the regression test calculator for any flaws you can find. You might gain bonus points, if you can find out how the calculation is done. Another set of bonus points if you can come up with a better approach.
This is the fourth part of a series of blog entries on a gift I got from Matt Heusser. Today, I’m heading for multiplayer games with our 11 year-old who has just same basic knowledge about English words.
A while back I received a gift from Matt Heusser, my early mentor in the Miagi-Do school. It asked me to test it. So, I decided to make a series of blog entries over the holidays out of it. Today we will start with the most obvious thing: unpacking.
In the past week Ulrich Freyer-Hirtz on the Agile Testing mailing list asked about different testing levels in an Agile project. He found the definition of unit, component, and acceptance tests appropriate based on several books. This discussion reminded me about the ambiguity that we face today in terms of testing. There have been several renaming attempts in the past few years. For example Dale Emery refers to a blog entry from 2004. Gojko Adzic made a similar renaming attempt. Let’s take a step back, and see what all those names really want to tell us. Afterwards we will be able to make a more informed decision about names.
I received quite some feedback on my last blog entry on certification. One of the feedbacks made me wonder what an alternative to certification is. This question struck me hard enough to write a follow-up on that. I think this question can be answered solely in a certain context. I’ll try to answer it under several contexts, one by one.
On the Agile testing mailing list there is currently a discussion on-going about the value of certifications and certificates. I have a strong opinion on it, and I would like to provide them on my blog. The basis has been the upcoming Certifiaction program for Agile testers. I have provided my critics to their courses as far as I could. I admire the efforts people put in such courses. That said, I don’t intend to offend anyone involved in certification programs, and will try to raise my objections as constructive as possible. But I also know that I will fail from time to time.
