Better Software - November 2008 - (Page 9)

Picks the test Manager’s Vade Mecum by fioNa charleS Testers and test managers who come equipped with their own practices and tools can save time and effort and get a head start on their projects. Test manager and consultant Fiona Charles describes the “go with me” collection she has built over many years and projects to help leverage her varied experience and provide a quick start on new deliverables. www.stickyMinds.com/eLetterpick10-9a Questions You should Ask? by Michele Sliger It’s a technique children and teenagers have mastered: asking “why?” until they get to an acceptable response (or until we’re too tired to continue answering). Find out how Michele Sliger uses a similar approach designed by Six Sigma to drill down into the underlying cause of any problem within software projects. She then continues the inquisition with a series of additional questions in order to find out how these problems affect business value and technology. Learn what these questions are and how you can start using them to find out why things aren’t going as planned. www.stickyMinds.com/eLetterpick10-9b the Exceptional Exception by Tod goldiNg So much more than a bucket for your errors, exceptions can be a valuable tool that lets you communicate to your clients not only that there is a problem but why and where the code failed. www.stickyMinds.com/eLetterpick10-9c enEwsLEttEr ExtrA A sampling of content from our eNewsletter archives stickyLetter: August 6, 2008 www.stickyminds.com/eLetter10-9 Hard drive Heartache by Holly Bourquin In high school, my English teacher assigned a research paper designed to prepare us for college. For a reason that escapes me now, I chose to write mine on the political and personal satire in Gulliver’s Travels and Alice in Wonderland. I can’t really tell you why, but I can tell you that if you think you have issues, you should read up on Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll. It took an amazing amount of research, and I do credit the work I put into the paper as good preparation for college. But not just because of the research. Around 8:00 the night before this fifteen-page beast was due, I headed into the basement where we kept our Tandy TRS-80 (for real) to start writing. I’ve always worked well under pressure (ironically writing this very StickyLetter the day before deadline), and at that point in my life I enjoyed the occasional all-nighter. So write I did, all night—but save I did not. Around 2 a.m., I had a good structure to the paper and was about twelve pages in, so I decided to print the report and read it on paper. Yet, I did not save the file. Somewhere around page six, my noisy dot matrix printer started chewing on the paper. In my efforts to straighten it out, I pulled the printer plug out of the socket, but it wasn’t the printer plug—it was the Tandy TRS-80 plug. With one strike I lost twelve pages. It was an awful moment. Right there I learned the hard way to save and to back up files lest I be stuck with a computer disaster. Fast forward a few years (OK, a little more) to present day. I have a great personal computer—a MacBook—that I adore. It is full of family photos, videos, music files, the files of my family Web site, and all the other stuff that you put on a personal computer. Because of my love for this computer, I bought it an external hard drive to do regular backups. And I did—once—sometime in 2007. So, two weeks ago when all my MacBook would do is display the international No symbol, I got a little nervous. I whisked it off to the Genius Bar certain that anything called the Genius Bar would be a place that could solve anything. They tried, even hooking up the hard drive to what looked like a heart-lung machine for computer hardware. As my genius so eloquently put it, my hard drive was “hosed.” My MacBook was then shipped off to Texas to be rebuilt, and I walked out of the Apple store empty handed. I was bereft, but mostly I was ashamed. I know better. I had learned the importance of backups and saving early on. Plus, by virtue of the industry I work in, I know better than the average folk. So why, why, why didn’t I have a more recent backup? The best answer I can come up with is because, well, I am a nincompoop. After many hours of sifting through CDs, emails, and Web sites, I’ve reclaimed about 80 percent of the data I lost, but the rest is gone for good and I have no one to blame but myself. It’s never fun to lose something, nor is it fun to admit when you’re the root of the problem. But both are valuable lessons. Can you really fix something you’ve done wrong if you don’t acknowledge your part in it? Once I managed to stop feeling sorry for myself for not backing up the hard drive, I spent some time educating myself about the best way to backup valuable data. By the time my rebuilt computer arrived at home, I was ready for it. I now have automatic backups scheduled! The peace of mind is amazing. What lessons have you learned the hard way? Email me and let me know. Holly Bourquin hbourquin@sqe.com PointEr Mind the Gap by At the risk of heresy, some executives are probably no smarter or experienced than you. scary, isn’t it? yuri cherNaK The requirements composition table is an effective technique comprising six steps that will help you assess an application’s test coverage and identify gaps in your test suite even if you don’t have any software requirements specifications. www.stickyMinds.com/eLetterpick10-9d www.StickyMinds.com NOVEMBER 2008 BETTER SOFTWARE 9 http://www.stickyminds.com/eLetter10-9 http://www.StickyMinds.com/eLetterpick10-9a http://www.StickyMinds.com/eLetterpick10-9b http://www.StickyMinds.com/eLetterpick10-9c http://www.StickyMinds.com/eLetterpick10-9d http://www.StickyMinds.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Better Software - November 2008

Better Software - November 2008 Contents Mark Your Calendar Contributors eLightenment Technically Speaking Code Craft Test Connection Management Chronicles Getting Agile with User-Centered Design Google Web Toolkit Simple Summaries of Complex Projects Product Announcements 10 Things You Might Not Know About … The Last Word Ad Index

Better Software - November 2008

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