Author Archives: Liz

Lots of better people than I have written excellent posts about how, in any system, people will play it to get the best reward. It’s not just software: If a teacher is rewarded according to the success rate of his … Continue reading →

Today, we had a lunchtime meeting about our ever-contentious functional test suite. Who cares about the functional test suite? The customers really care about our functional test suite. I know, because when I was on the dev team I had … Continue reading →

Reading about Neal Ford’s frustration when trying to explain Agile reminded me of this: “The best way not to be unhappy is not to have a word for it.”      Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy I guess … Continue reading →

On Friday, I ran a workshop to teach some of my colleagues how to write haiku (a haijin is a haiku poet). Many pleasant surprises: the number of people (I suspect they were press-ganged), the willingness of all participants to … Continue reading →

Some time ago, someone – let’s call him George – changed all the tests I had written for a batch of Support classes which had been created as a “temporary measure” and had now become part of the system. The … Continue reading →

Us poor souls on your Support Staff are just another kind of end-user. Our Gui is made up of logs, reports and audits. We need love too! We need the same kind of attention to our needs as you give … Continue reading →

If you think you’re going to finish reading all those books you bought, you need more books.

As part of my preparation for a workshop I’m running next week, I’ve been studying the art and science of Mind Mapping, and the idea of Radiant Thinking which mind maps express. I have to admit, scribbling with felt tip … Continue reading →

When code is refactored, the tests associated with it help you to be sure that you haven’t broken anything. But code doesn’t test the tests! If you’ve ever renamed a test and accidentally typed tsetThat… at the beginning, you have … Continue reading →

So that was XP2005. What an amazing five days. Thanks to everyone who ran tutorials and workshops, presented papers or took time out from the northern ale to chat to me in the bar, and everyone here who let me … Continue reading →