pbielicki's blog
Christmas and New Year is coming so it's time for some summary. I've never done this before but this year was quite awesome and I have something to be proud and loud.
Let's start from January when I moved from my hometown to the glamorous French Riviera i.e Cote d'azur (yes, the sea here is pretty much azure).
I accomplished some cool stuff at work and one that I can share with you is the new generation hotel search engine - Wallaby (which is working but still in beta phase).
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"There is no fool like an old fool" says popular international proverb. One of the meanings of this proverb is that people can make mistakes but they should learn from them. You are not a fool if you make mistake but you become one if you make the same mistake again. It simply means that you're not learning.
The same rules apply to the software development teams - it's much easier to work in an environment that encourages you to learn and to create knowledge. Why should you create knowledge? Well, the best way to learn something is to make mistakes by yourself but it wouldn't be wise to let all the engineers invent the wheel all over again. It's much better to teach them about what we already know, what works and what doesn't. It's much better and safer (yet a bit less effective) to learn from someone else's mistakes.
In this post I will try to explain "Create Knowledge" principle from "Implementing Lean Software Development - from Concept to Cash" book.
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I was doing a quick research for this article using Google trying to find arguments standing for the claim that "quality is expensive". I was trying to find some resources saying that care for quality in the early stages of the software projects doesn't make sense and doesn't pay - I find it very difficult and I cannot share with you any reasonable links (maybe except for this one which refers to another post saying that "Quality Sucks").
What does it mean? It means that software people know that quality is very important. Why then quality of software products sucks in more cases than it rocks?
In many big corporations following waterfall model there is a special team named QA (Quality Assurance). This team's responsibility is (not surprisingly) to assure appropriate level of quality in the software product. This is fine, this is perfectly OK, except that QA is considered as a separate activity. This is the "Verification" or "Testing" box in the waterfall model diagram.
The biggest problem with this attitude is that QA team gets the product after it has been implemented and this is the root cause of all evil. QA is considered as something separate - we first do the product and then we care about the quality. This way of thinking is wrong. You should care about quality from the day one, before you write a single line of code.
Software teams should "build quality in" their products and QA should not be considered as a separate activity. Quality Assurance should be constant process of improving the product - QA activities and people should be involved in the development of the product during the development, not after when the developers are moved to another projects or even teams.
In this post I will try to explain "Build Quality In" principle from "Implementing Lean Software Development - from Concept to Cash" book. I will present few practices that will help your team build software with quality built in.
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Some time ago I was talking to engineers responsible for some part of the software and I was asking when they will be ready for production. In other words I asked them when their features will be ready. They told me that they are ready now. What was my surprise when I tried to test their software and discovered that about 50% of cases were not working at all. So I asked them why they told me that they are "done" when they haven't even implemented half of the planned features? They answered me: "We know it doesn't work but it's done - we implemented something so it's done. Now we have to work on quality i.e. implement rest of the features."
When I heard this I think I might have looked like the lady from the picture. I couldn't believe someone can think like this - if we implement one use case out of one hundred we can consider the project done? The rest is the "quality"? I don't think so.
In this post I'll try to explain once again what is definition of done and why it's so important to have the same definition at least among all the people involved in the development of a single project.
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Developers are the customers - from time to time. They are the customers for product definition/specification team that is preparing technical specification documents. It doesn't really matter whether you work in an agile or non-agile environment - I'm sure you have some technical documentation and the main goal of it is to answer developers' questions on technical issues (e.g. how to configure some components to work with others, how to map fields from GUI forms to XML message, etc.) It also helps test or QA team to prepare acceptance tests and to verify whether what developers implemented is what was specified (I know it stinks a bit the waterfall but stay tuned - I will say something about agile documentation soon).
I would suggest you reading an article on TAGRI (They Aren't Gonna Read It) by Scott W. Ambler - it's really great. And in my post I'm going to give you real-life example from what I experienced regarding documentation. I will share with you my opinions of what kind of documentation sucks and what documents are really cool and useful (btw. my dream documentation is the one with which I'm able to find accurate information of my interest quickly and be able to put this information into my head in less than 10 minutes - the picture you see is a total contradiction of my dream - it's a waterfall process).
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One of the core XP practices is having a Customer Team Member. It means that development teams have access to the newest information from the customer's side and they know about all changes in the requirements very quickly. Having on-site customer (or customer proxy for commercial products with lots of potential customers) ensures that requests change informally, the process becomes flexible, and saves the cost of formal overhead.
In this post I would like to take another look at this practice. I would like to share with you my thoughts why having a Customer Team Member can help the development team win together with their customer. And I would like to take a "social" view on this practice.
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No matter who you are, where you live and what your job is you have to make decisions. Some decisions are easier, some more difficult (e.g. which way do you want to go on the crossroad with traffic lights from the picture?). But why making decisions is hard? When you make a decision, how do you know it is the right one? What information (if any) you have to posses to make the right decision?
This problem can be referred as "Defer Commitment" principle. Very briefly it tells you to make the decision in the last possible moment when you have enough information to be sure you are going in the right direction. It doesn't tell to you to procrastinate - NOT AT ALL! It's a wrong thinking. It only tells you that you have to wait and collect the data and as soon as you have enough information, make the decision.
In this post I will try to explain "Defer Commitment" principle from "Implementing Lean Software Development - from Concept to Cash" book.
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In this eleven minute tutorial I'm presenting TDD with mocking technique using JUnit 4.x and EasyMock library. This is more advanced example of Test Driven Development - video tutorial on basics can be downloaded from here: Test Driven Development in practice.
Source code for this tutorial can be downloaded here (you can find also Eclipse project files in this bundle, so it's easy to import the project directly to your IDE - NetBeans users have to create a new project and add relevant classpath changes). Note that external.jar was built with Java 6 and thus you have to use at least JDK version 6 to be able to compile and run the example.
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Last week I had a great fun and honour to interview Janusz Gorycki who is a partner and a team manager in an Agile Software Development company - Spartez. Janusz is also the author of the open-source screen capture and painting utility for Windows named Mazio.
In this interview I'm asking Janusz about how they founded their company and how agile movement helped them achieve success. I'm also asking how they see their agility, what problems they have and how they deal with them. Janusz also answers why you can be CMMI-compliant using agile methodologies and recommends steps by which you can start applying Agile practices in your company.
Is this interview about yet another agile company? Not really - Spartez is an extraordinary company composed of ordinary engineers who were not afraid of making their dreams come true. Their determination, team work, a bit of luck and an extreme agile spirit helped them be and work together and become successful. This is a real-life example how cross-functional team, where each member is an expert in some areas, is able to deliver any software to any customer. And how do I know this? I used to be a part of this team at Intel and know this team as well as each member pretty well, however I'm not affiliated with them anymore in any way.
If you are interested in getting to know how they started, what and how they do now, this article is for you. Maybe you will follow their dreams and ideas - I think it's worth.
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In this tutorial I'm presenting Selenium IDE - a tool for recording and replaying functional tests of web based applications. I'm showing how to record a simple test, test for Ajax-enabled application and how to replay such tests in Firefox web browser. I'm not showing how to start Selenium tests from Continuous Integration server in this tutorial - this is a subject for separate post.
I hope you will like it.
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