act:ualise | technology

I was so open-mouthed with amazement at this post by Uncle Bob that I had to re-post! 
I know Joel Spolsky has a lot of followers so you would expect statements like “Quality doesn’t matter that much” to be backed by something substantive; Uncle Bob lays right in with a swingeing assault (go Bob!).

Reading this question/answer on Stackoverflow I tangentially wondered whether working to Agile practices played any greater a role in my technical skills development compared to ‘back in the day‘ when I wasn’t using Agile methods.
There ought to be no difference in technical skills development whether the context is Agile or any other process – indeed [...]

For the past few years myself and colleagues have used Selenium extensively to test-drive (and continuously test) all the web-apps which we’ve collectively been responsible for. In that time our massed experience meant we got pretty slick at writing these tests. Then when I started on a new project with a new team, I realised [...]

Whilst this article is clearly specific to Lean in manufacturing processes what I find pleasing is how fundamentally similar a ‘Morning Market’ is to the morning Scrum in software development.

Its a short morning meeting
It’s not a forum to attempt to solve problems or to discuss them in detail, but a place to surface them
Where problems [...]

I have recently been attempting to get my head around Open Flash Chart to, at the very least, get an equivalent ‘Hello World’ version running before I run off customising it. Should be simple right? Well yes, once you get around a real showstopping gotcha which isn’t documented out there.
The starting point, this tutorial example. [...]

In my previous article on performance testing, I suggested that incremental and iterative development of performance unit tests was an essential part of your overall performance testing strategy. However, performance testing the parts of a system is vastly different from testing the whole and will require some careful thinking to avoid too much focus on [...]

In our last three projects we automated our performance testing extensively. This involved significant effort, which paid off for the 2 projects already delivered: meeting performance expectations owed a great deal to our performance improvements.
Interestingly after the bulk of those improvements were delivered and the product made live, the performance automation testing aspects fell slowly into [...]