Re-post: Mocks Aren't Stubs.

For programmers:
http://martinfowler.com/articles/mocksArentStubs.html

Embrace your Inner Designer

I've always thought good design is an important skill for developers.  Sure, I know about design, and I still could use improvement.

Here's a blog post from my brother, which I found helpful:
http://jaredrobinson.com/blog/openwest-embrace-your-inner-designer/?utm_source=feedly
There's a lot to learn from it.

Testing, "bugs cluster" and the "rumblestrip" heuristics

I thought this sounded like fault injection, and wondered if there might be a parallel in testing

http://nowiknow.com/brown-out/

Apparently, one rock band had a book of requirements for setting up their show.  If a seemingly silly requirement was missed, it was a signal that other things might be missed as well.  The requirement: a bowl of m&m’s with brown ones taken out.

I suppose in testing, if we notice one thing is missing, we can often suspect that other details may have been missed as well.  When we notice problems, we can/tend to think two things: that there are probably more bugs (they tend to cluster), and we should see how bad the bug we found can get.

Tips for automated testing (re-post)

The way this writer expresses himself suggests humility, in the Context-Driven sense.  I think it's worth a read.
https://devver.wordpress.com/2008/07/07/tips-for-unit-testing/

Recommended Reading: ScrumButs are the best part of Scrum

http://www.noop.nl/2009/09/scrumbuts-are-the-best-part-of-scrum.html

Here are some excerpts:

"...there are organizations that adapt Scrum for the wrong reasons, making it half-Agile, or even non-Agile... We might call these adaptations negative ScrumButs. They make a team's performance worse.

"But if you do your retrospectives well, they should lead to positive ScrumButs, making the team's performance better, which is great! It is the best part of Scrum! Scrum is a great starting point for many teams, just like XP and Kanban..."

Does it work vs Can it break? QA definitions.

I sense more than a bit of disrespect for the common saying that QA is dead or dying.  In all honestly, quality is a continuum, and no marketable software product I know of is completely absent of some level of testing or quality effort, nor completely absent of defects.  Still, it's worth bearing in mind that quality is hard, and most people don't produce software with relatively high degrees of quality.  I think most people don't understand quality, because the word itself encompasses many things to many people, at different times and different ways.  Grasping the landscape of "qualities" and "value" is not a task for the feeble-minded (though I don't claim that good testers aren't sometimes feeble, nor that feeble testers are never good).

So, I like this quote:
"'Beware of the above code. I have only tested that it works. I haven't actually tried it.'" (Unit Tests Don't Find Bugs: the Death of QA)

Better combo box dropdowns

I thought this was a rather cool addon for web pages.  It improves combo boxes without any server-side changes needed.
http://harvesthq.github.com/chosen/