BDD Intro, Nov 2012

I was kindly invited by Gwen Stewart to meet up with her team at Microsoft and share my experience with Behaviour Driven Development and agile dev process.

High level BDD intro and experience exchange with MSN websites and Win 8 apps teams. Thanks for the invitation and nice evening session with crisps and beers.
@Microsoft, London Victoria, Thu 29 November 2012.

Bdd intro for Microsoft, 29 Nov 2012 from alex_ikhelis

Your Own Personal Daisy

or "IntEng Team Event Oct 2012"

Expedia IntEng is a really great team to work in and have fun with. We had a lovely team outing in April, went for a canoeing exercise in the Lake Washington. Apparently it was not enough and we did a proper team building which included a little bit of swimming and a great canoe team rescuing. That was exciting!

We had another team event in October: we visited the glass museum and EMP, where the new super star rock band was formed.

 It has become world-famous since then, its name is "Personal Daisy", first live performance: 17 October 2012, Seattle, WA.

Personal Daisy, 17 Oct 2012

ALE 2012 Unconference, Barcelona, 29-31 August 2012

I've got a great new experience of unconferencing within a purely agile community (process oriented agile coaches were the biggest part of the audience).
European technology & agile communities are fab, thanks for the great conference folks!

My pics are available here: http://goo.gl/4NYXL

ALE2012 References:
http://ale2012.alenetwork.eu/
http://ale2012.alenetwork.eu/2012/09/02/content-and-impressions-from-ale2012/
http://ale2012.alenetwork.eu/2012/09/03/ale-2012-keynote-videos/

The Cucumber Book mind map

My mind map for the Cucumber Book.
Contains ideas and references I personally found interesting to memorise or follow up on.

Some other useful tools in ruby/rails: Chef, puppet, Vagrant, jruby+torquebox (for med & enterprise-size apps) + nailgun/drip (improve jvm up start up time), binding.pry (interactive debugging), poltergeist (headless browser driver)

Example of Modern Agile Software Company Process Evolution in late 2000s

Share from Michael Dubakov (Target Process) blog: Our Development Process: 50 Months of Evolution.

Our Development Process: 50 Months of Evolution 
Michael Dubakov, TargetProcess Founder
May 10, 2012

   Our company is almost 6 years old now. It was founded on agile principles and grew up on them. We've used Extreme Programming from day 1, immixed some Scrum ideas later on and switched to Kanban in the end. Here below I've tried to review our process changes for the last 4 years...
Read more..

How Google Tests Software

This is a cross-post from summary notes at the techtrain blog. 

Video: James Whittaker at QASIG Seattle
Slides: James Whittaker’s slides for the QASIG Seattle talk

How test engineering is done at Google. It is not about testing, it is about quality. People don’t really care about testing, they care about quality. James listed 10 things that Google does to increase quality.

This is a vision of where computing is going, and where Google
already is. All mentioned tools (aimed for web, Android) are open sourced, by Google. 

It’s about scalability. When you are releasing a new version of a web
application every day, or multiple times a day, and that application
is used by millions of people, you need to reduce the number of bugs
that get released to near zero, and roll back very rapidly when you do
find any bugs. 

Book is available online here: How Google Tests Software book.

Google also uses uTest - crowd sourced testing startup that farms out certain kinds of tests to humans over the web.

There is a number of home-built open-sourced software from Google in the talk:

• Test Analytics (ACC) Tool – replaces test plans
• Browser Integrated Testing Environment (BITE) Tool – record browser
  scenarios in Javascript, record video, file bugs automatically
• Quality Bots – compare web page layouts, even across browsers – much
  is done automatically, but it does forward to humans when necessary

Automated Testing Principles by Paul Nelson

Share of Paul Nelson approach to testing, listed in a set of principles. I really like it. Note, that the principles are general, do not apply to only UI level automation, moreover facilitate testing done on the level corresponding to the current test goal.

Software Testing Principles

One of the most valuable testing strategies is to ask a couple simple questions:

• What am I trying to test?
• Why am I trying to test it?

Answering the above questions can help keep testing efforts focused on real benefits. Following the principles below should help drive to high quality testing solutions: