James King

What you do next matters.

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  • Regression testing – day 1

    Regression testing is the easy part of IT development, not the horrible monster  some people think it has to be. But where do you start if you want to do effective regression testing, but you are already busy and don’t want it to be huge burden? I hope this article and a couple that follow…

  • An international standard for being stupid? The mistakes users always make

    Before I worked in IT and even knew what testing was, I knew people made mistakes. But I didn’t know there was an international standard you should comply with when you want to make a mistake. Then I worked on a project with a mining company and one of the consultants explained human factor analysis…

  • A project charter for lazy teams

    I have been creating a couple of blogs on context recently. The idea is that if you know a bit about your users and the product that you are building. Both can take months or years, but I like to think we can even spend an hour or less to understand our project.

  • A simple product summary to help requirements

    I was speaking to a crew who were struggling with regression testing and after interrogating them they finally admitted that a large part of the reason they were struggling was that they did not really understand what they were testing. I was shocked and horrified so I wandered off. Soon after I spoke to some…

  • Scenario testing the cycle of pain for regression testing

    If you want to do a Phd in human psychology, then grab an  IT team and ask them to do regression testing. Regression testing is simply the idea that when you make changes to a system you should test to make sure you haven’t broken what was already there. But for reasons unknown to psychologists,…

  • User stories for production support part 2: PAC

    I wrote an article on stories for production support teams quite a while ago.  But I always meant to add a couple more. The problem with production support is that nobody has time to ask for what they want, but it is all urgent and super critical. So the last thing you often feel like…

  • Making regression testing suck less and yet be more effective – exploratory testing

    I have often found that regression testing is both important and boring, so I usually try to automate it as much as possible. Unfortunatley there there is often little or no automation in place at all when you join a new team and there is often not enough time to get it working properly before…

  • Manual regression testing may not suck so badly after all

    I often work with good developers and one thing I notice about all good developers is that they seem to love the idea of building robots. Bad developers see problems and sit there waiting for someone to come up with a solution in enough detail for the developer to transcribe the solution into code, much…

  • An international standard for being scared?

    I sometimes quote ISO90210 (not a real standard) to represent a common approach that, while often used, is not a formally recognised standard.  It is more a common but informal way people approach something. In this case I am looking at how to be scared.  Apparently there is a standard approach to being scared that…

  • A daily status meeting? Really? Now you want daily performance measures? Really?

    I run agile training courses and I often preach the benefit of a daily standup.  The idea is that it is 15 minutes a day where everyone in the team lists What they have done since last time What they will do today What obstacle or issue is in their way It works really well…