Agile projects are well known for using a task board for teams to track what is being worked. They can be a simple wall in an office taped off with columns for status or web-based tools that allow detailed tracking of individual stories and tasks. No matter what is being used, the task board needs […]
Crisis management is a tough job. The biggest problem isn’t solving the technical problem — given a little time, you surely can solve it. It often involves planning and anticipating crises will occur. Good crisis management has a contingency plan and always gives themselves a bit of wiggle room to avoid the necessary shifting priorities. […]
I’ve been working in the mobile space plenty recently, and exploring a whole host of tools. One of the great tools I recently stumbled across was Blazemeter. Among other things, Blazemeter lets you playback a recorded script of web traffic, and simulate user load, similar to JMeter. Blazemeter, however, can mimic all sorts of different […]
One of my all-time favorite sales books is entitled Hope Is Not a Strategy. It’s a book about how to properly manage sales teams and opportunities. But I often use this slogan when talking to senior executives about their unrealistic software project expectations. When teams push back on unrealistic project release schedules, story estimates, or […]
The concept of whole team quality is a good one. Everybody on a project should be responsible for quality. Unfortunately, there are often holes in our whole team quality approach. Here are a few I’ve seen: No definition of Done – It’s difficult to achieve quality if you don’t define what it means! So many […]
When talking about the activities critical to agile success, one often hears about daily huddles, continuous integration, and user acceptance testing, but I’ve found that the agile principle of Self-directed Teams is equally important. Teams should be allowed to estimate and assign their own work for a variety of reasons: 1) Estimates will be more […]
Introduction Last month wrapped up my Cucumber posts for a while. I’ve covered the full gamut of topics for Cucumber, and I don’t believe I have too many more nuggets of knowledge to offer without putting myself out of a job. While working with Cucumber over the past year I’ve done a lot of research. […]
I’m often asked what makes mobile testing so different that testing anything else? The simple answer is your goal. When we test a web application, per say, the goal of our testing is to often ensure that the application fulfills the requirements as directed by the product owner, that it meets any standards set by […]
I am a big fan of static analysis and formatting tools. I just like my code to be as clean as possible. At the very least, being clean makes the code easier to read and maintain. If I can find a tool that will make it easy for me to keep my code clean, I’ll […]
As one of our resident security guys, I thought I might write up a quick guide about what not to do with password management. As long as you build a website or web service, at some point you’re most likely going to have to store a password. Unfortunately for many developers out there (in organizations […]
