|
|
|
|
Fresh Ink An Advance Look at What's Inside This Month's Issue of Better Software Magazine 3 July 2008 Coming to a mailbox near you: - New & Notable - Featured Article - Blurring the Line Code Craft Programming with GUTs by Kevlin Henney Test Connection Two Cheers for Ambiguity by Michael Bolton Management Chronicles Going on a Picnic with James Watt by Clarke Ching - Editor's Note: Two Heads Are Better than One _______________________________________________________________ New & Notable: Can't wait to get the July/August issue of Better Software magazine in the mail? Visit http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/sqe/bettersoftware0708 to read the digital edition today! Better Software magazine has a bug on the loose! Search through the digital edition to find the bug. We'll give you a clue: It's red, has wings, and flies, and it's hidden in one of the articles. Find and click the bug before August 30. to be entered for a chance to win an iPod Shuffle*. *Offer valid for US residents only, contest ends August 30, 2008. Winner will be notified via email by September 5, 2008. Featured White Paper: Gartner: "MarketScope for Application Quality Management Solutions, 1Q08" This Gartner MarketScope for Application Quality Management Solutions, 1Q08 provides guidance for enterprises seeking to purchase tools to manage risk and ensure software quality. The focus is on tools fit for large-scale enterprise use and that are ready out of the box to manage quality requirements and functional testing. http://www.stickyminds.com/IBMWhitePaper **************************************************************** ADVERTISEMENT: Try our new and improved eLearning for training without travel and time constraints? Experience interactive lessons in a multimedia format delivered right to your desktop. Register now and receive a copy of the reference book "A Practitioner's Guide to Software Test Design," written by Lee Copeland, along with a complimentary PC audio head set. Try the New Online eLearning Demo! Get started today!--> http://sqe.com/go?eMTDeLetter1 **************************************************************** ________________________________________________________________ Writer's Block: A human is limited in the amount of source code-detailed information that can be remembered from one page to the next. An ASA is not limited by this restriction, and besides, most of us do not relish the prospect of examining other people's code for hours at a time. ~Greg Pope, Kim Ferrari, and Bill Oliver, "Give Your Defects Some Static" ________________________________________________________________ Featured Article: How to Fail with Agile By Clinton Keith and Mike Cohn A switch to agile often conflicts with personal career goals such as maintaining the status quo and working no harder than necessary. These twenty guidelines will help you sabotage your agile project, helping you fail quickly and spectacularly. Click here to view a complete list of featured articles from this and past issues: http://www.stickyminds.com/BetterSoftware/magazine.asp?fn=cifea ________________________________________________________________ Blurring the Line: These articles appear simultaneously on StickyMinds.com. We encourage you to log on and post your comments and questions for the authors. Programming with GUTs By Kevlin Henney Since tests are commonly viewed in terms of offering quantitative feedback on the presence or absence of defects in specific situations, Good Unit Tests need both to illustrate and define the behavioral contract of the unit in question. Do you have GUTs? Keep reading and join the discussion on good unit tests and test-driven development at... http://www.stickyminds.com/CodeCraft10-6 Two Cheers for Ambiguity By Michael Bolton Some people dismiss words such as skill, diversity, problems, and mission as being too ambiguous to be useful. But one tester's ambiguity is another tester's gauge for assessing consensus on a project and how to achieve that consensus. Keep reading and join the discussion on recognizing ambiguity at... http://www.stickyminds.com/TestConnection10-6 Going on a Picnic with James Watt By Clarke Ching What if you had a picnic and no one brought potato salad? Find out what picnic planning and steam engines have to do with project success and not just satisfying your customers but delighting them. Keep reading and join the discussion on improving the customer experience at... http://www.stickyminds.com/ManagementChronicles10-6 **************************************************************** STARWEST 2008 - Software Testing Analysis & Review Conference Attend the Greatest Software Testing Conference on Earth! September 29 - October 3, 2008 |Disneyland Hotel| Anaheim, California New Expanded Program including full- and half-day tutorial learning options. Learn about new products, timely issues, and cutting-edge testing solutions. * Register Early and SAVE $200! * http://www.sqe.com/go?SW08FreshInk **************************************************************** "How to Build a Testing Center of Excellence" The latest Web seminar brought to you by StickyMinds.com and Better Software magazine * Sponsored by Cognizant * Testing Centers of Excellence (TCE) benefit organizations by centralizing testing efforts and addressing an enterprise’s specific requirements. However, the path to such a model is not always obvious. Join us Tuesday July 8, at 11 a.m. ET, when speaker Sripriya Kalyanasundaram elaborates upon some best practices of a successful, phased model for consolidating a TCE. Register and attend this Web seminar to be automatically entered into our drawing for an iPod Shuffle. http://www.sqe.com/go?WS070808FI **************************************************************** Media Spotlight Gray Matters Podcast: Linda Rising In this episode of Gray Matters, Joey McAllister chats with Linda Rising at the 2008 Better Software Conference & EXPO about deception. Do we deceive ourselves and others about estimation? Do we have a choice? http://www.stickyminds.com/podcasts#GM0608. **************************************************************** Editor's Note: Two Heads Are Better than One In this age of email, Twitter, text messages, and instant messenger, it seems like we should be communicating with one another better than we ever have before. But that's not always the case. I've found that sometimes nothing beats a good old-fashioned face-to-face conversation, especially when we’re working out the bugs in an issue of the magazine. When we first hired Cathy, our in-house art director, I went through a bit of a transition period. I was used to working with off-site freelancers, so communication through electronic means was the norm. But when I suddenly found myself co-located with a living, breathing person, I continued to rely on the computer for a large part of our interactions, simply out of habit. Part of the reason we hired an in-house art director was to alleviate the frustration that came from my trying to communicate edits and changes relying solely on the type-written word. It's quite a challenge to convey to someone that you want a "less swoopy font" without being able to point and gesture. For the first few months Cathy and I fumbled our way through the production process. I would edit a round of proofs and leave them on her desk. Then I would get the next round of proofs and some of my edits would be missing. When I approached Cathy, she would often say that my notes weren't clear so she didn't know what I wanted her to do. I was frustrated, Cathy was frustrated, so, after a particularly challenging round of edits, our manager sat us down and told us about railroading, a technique she had used while working for an academic journal. Railroading involves two people sitting side by side at a desk and comparing the edits that were made with the edits that should have been made. The exercise helped to open the lines of communication between us. We now go through each page and discuss what needs to be done, often making the changes in real time. After reading this issue's The Last Word, I realized that railroading is kind of the publishing equivalent of pair programming in software. In "Encourage Pair Programming," Rob Myers explains why pair programming can be a boon to your project and while it may seem like two doing the work of one, it can actually boost the effectiveness and efficiency of your team. Also in this issue, find out how to get management off your back about going agile once and for all. In "How to Fail with Agile," Clinton Keith and Mike Cohn offer twenty tips that are sure to help you avoid potential success and get back to your comfort zone quickly. In "A Galaxy of Patterns," Neil Harrison wants you to look past the Gang of Four's twenty-three patterns, which are commonly viewed as the only ones worth knowing, and discover that they are not the only patterns in the universe. Our third feature this month is an overview of automated static analyzer tools and how they can be used to analyze source code and uncover defects and vulnerabilities. As always, I hope you take away a ton of helpful information from this issue. Email me and let me know how you put Better Software magazine to work for you. Happy reading! Heather Shanholtzer HShanholtzer@sqe.com Find out what you missed in past issues at: http://www.stickyminds.com/FreshInk/archive.asp **************************************************************** ADVERTISEMENT: New Agile Training Courses Implementing Agile projects in your organization and want to master Agile Development techniques? SQE Training has a new agile training program for you. Learn, experience, and practice the ScrumMaster approach to managing development. Practice using test-first design development methods. Gain experience developing programs in small verifiable steps for better designs. Create user stories that describe what the user really needs. Attend two courses in the same location and save up to $300. Register today! http://www.sqe.com/go?AGEL ******************************************************************************* Fresh Ink is an extension of StickyMinds.com and Better Software magazine--and a reminder that your "online resource for building better software" is just a click away at http://www.stickyminds.com/ ________________________________________
Subscriber Services You are receiving this issue of Fresh Ink as part of
your StickyMinds.com To change your email address or update your
preferences, go to To ensure optimal receipt of these emails, please add
To unsubscribe, go to **If this eLetter has been forwarded to you by a
friend, you can SOFTWARE QUALITY ENGINEERING 330 CORPORATE WAY, STE.
300 |