Category Archives: Uncategorized

(Just so I remember) Which of your projects made you cry at night, and why? I suspect that our abilities to define exactly why a project made us cry have been shaped by those projects which didn’t. Lack of communcation … Continue reading →

One of my poems, “A Stitch in Time”, is now online at The Fortean Bureau.

After some struggling, we managed to get our build file working this morning. “Owned! Devs 1, Build File 0”, I thought. It’s an odd expression, “Owned”, commonly used by gamers and people who read too much PvP. It’s used to … Continue reading →

Last week, we had a lunchtime get-together to talk about refactoring the functional tests. This week, we had another conversation about “things that were really good” about the project. A little gem came up between them: CardSuites. A CardSuite is … Continue reading →

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 →