Do we Really Need to Know?
Traditional agile user stories are on the form: “As a user I want to xxx so that I can yyy”. A simple example would be “as a mobile phone user I want to make a phone call to my mistress so that I can arrange our next meeting”. But hey,…
Teaching Software Craftmanship
Can you successfully teach software craftmanship to university students? I have several old colleagues who try to improve how programming skills are picked up by students, for instance Marie Nordström worked on how to improve student comprehension of object oriented programming concepts. Yesterday, I found out about a project where…
What is the ROI of Testing?
A question that pops up now and then is “What is the ROI of testing?” A Korean research paper from December 2011 tries to answer the question.
Agile Product Metrics
An MSc thesis on agile product metrics: http://tutkielmat.uta.fi/pdf/gradu05566.pdf
Agile is not About Laissez-Faire
Many people and companies think of Agile as some kind of Laissez-Faire approach to project management and software development. Agile is in fact a very rigid structure on how to do things so that there may be flexibility in what to do. Agile project management is based on advanced project…
User Story Life Cycle is Not Enough
The usual agile requirements life cycle consists of three simple states: “not started”, “in progress” and “done”. This is not enough! These steps only cover the software development part of the requirements life cycle. Do not forget about the stages before and after. First requirements are new, then they are…
You don’t Need User Stories to be Agile
Someone probably told you that you must have user stories to be Agile, right? But really, you don’t need user stories to be agile! I would have you consider what kinds of stakeholders and requirements you have and are trying to meet. Continue reading
Do We Listen too Much to the “Business”?
Yesterday I watched a documentary on National Geographic about the infamous Sampoong Dept Store Collapse. It immediately got me thinking of some of the threads running here on testing and the business case for testing. In Agile and in our industry in general we always say that fulfilling business requirements…
Agile Change Requests
There are change requests and then there are agile change requests. Now, I hear some of you saying to yourselves: “He is crazy, there is no such thing as ‘agile change request’!” You are right, partly, I agree that agile methods were designed to avoid change requests. But! All change…
Can Source Code Metrics predict Maintainability?
I did my Ph.D. thesis on how network factors can predict and influence user satisfaction in wireless networks. I.e. how “hard” but low-level technical factors have an impact on more abstract entities. Hegedűs et al does something similar but for source code metrics and their impact on maintainability. It has…