Software Reality

Best of / Worst of . . . Life

I did one of these best of/worst of screenshots a while back, with two wildly opposing Slashdot stories that happen to have been posted right next to each other. This one's entirely different in nature, but no less depressing!  The new beginnings, the hope, the infinite potential... and, billions of years later, the result.

Requirements Testing 101 - Involve Your Team

So many projects suffer from "over the fence syndrome": that is, the business analysts put together a specification (if you're lucky) and throw it over the fence to the developers. The developers code up the system and throw it over the next fence along to the testers. The testers sign off on the developed system, maybe even referring back to the original requirements spec, and then the system gets released - thrown over the really big wall (with the barbed wire at the top) to the customer waiting outside. That's not the way to operate.

In theory, the sort of project I've just described ticks the boxes of "failsafe development": there are requirements specs, analysts, even a team of testers and a release process. So what could possibly go wrong?

The problem is that in this kind of setup, no-one talks to each other. Each department regards itself as a separate entity, with delineated delivery gateways between them. Throw a document into the portal, and it emerges at some other point in the universe, like an alien tablet covered in arcane inscriptions that will take thousands of years for linguistic experts to decipher. Naturally, requirements are going to be misinterpreted. The "sign-off" from the testers will be pretty meaningless, as they were never closely involved in the requirements process: so their understanding of the true business requirements will be superficial at best.

Really effective testers will question the requirements and spot loopholes in business logic. And you'll be eternally grateful to them when they prevent a project from being released into production with faulty requirements. But the testers don't stand a chance of doing this if they're not closely involved with developing the requirement tests.

Let the testers "own" the requirement tests (i.e. be responsible for their development and maintenance). The customer and your business analysts build the requirements up; the testers write tests to knock them down again.

Another way to think of the business tests suite is that it's an independent audit created by a testing organization to show that the system created by the developers does what the customer intended. If the developers are left to manage the testing themselves, then you end up with the Green Bar of Shangri-La syndrome: the system tells us there's a green bar, so everything's okay man... This is why it's vital to have a separate team - the QA testers, who are answerable to the business, not to the developers - verifying the software. And if the testers are involved early enough, they will also verify the requirements themselves.

DDT Chapter 8 (Requirements Testing) is now up on the Apress Alpha Books page...

Code Bubbles and Porky Visual Studio

Here's my latest article at The Register:

The latest incarnation of Visual Studio had a difficult gestation, with critics pointing to the slowness and instability of the beta release...

... This isn't just a criticism leveled solely at Visual Studio; it's against all the modern IDEs out there - VS in day-to-day use is not so different from what we were doing with the first version of Visual Basic 19 years ago. Somehow, Microsoft managed to fatten Visual Studio up to porcine levels and yet using the product feels like you're trapped in the 1990s.

Java IDEs suffer from the same problem, to an extent. IDE evolution has become a game of feature creep, each new release touting bold new features, drawing in concepts well outside an IDE's core competency - half-baked UML support springs to mind - and packing it all into a single frame. The notion of "doing one thing, and doing it well" has been laughed out the window.

And the reason for this stagnation of innovation in the IDE space? The industry leaders have become portly, comfortable, and middle-aged. Eclipse is smoking its logical representation of a pipe, content to let plug-in developers pad out its ecosystem. NetBeans plays perpetual catch-up while its fate is decided for it. IntelliJ no longer sells itself on productivity, having fallen into the "feature checklist" trap.

The time is ripe for a brand-new contender to stroll in with something fresh and steal developer mindshare from beneath the leaders' pipe-yellowed moustaches - just as a young Eclipse once did to NetBeans.

The bubblicious Code Bubbles IDE could be just that new contender. It puts a leash around Eclipse to do the donkey work for it, but invents an entirely new front-end so that programming becomes more like playing with Matey in the bath. A prototype from Brown University in New England and video about Code Bubbles has passed the frothy developer test, with viral emails flying around the workplace.

>> Read more at The Register

DDT Acceptance Testing chapter now fully baked

Counting backwards (as we appear to be writing the book in reverse), the next chapter - Chapter 8, Acceptance Testing - is now up on the Apress Alpha Books page.

We've divided acceptance testing into two areas - business requirements (the subject of Chapter 8), and behavioral requirements (the subject of Chapter 7, which we've just completed and should be up on the Alpha Books page soon).

So Chapter 8 is really Acceptance Testing Part II (or Part I, depending which way around you look at it...)

We think QA testing teams should be very happy with Chapter 8, as it demonstrates an automated method of turning business requirements into test reports and checklists. The chapter shows how to generate customer-facing (and tester-facing) business requirement tests from the requirements in your analysis model, how to organise those tests, and how to generate a test plan document from them. This process supports an independent Quality Assurance organisation, providing a level of assurance that the customer's requirements have been met, beyond the development team asserting that "all our unit tests light up green."

Announcing Fingerpress - a new book publisher

So I thought I'd start up a publishing company...

Fingerpress is a brand-new book publisher - our first book isn't out yet - covering several genres and categories. It's a good example of how the economics of the Internet are allowing so-called "micro-publishers" to spring up, providing potential homes for the undercurrent of often barnstormingly good fiction that's out there.

It's a travesty, in a way, that perfectly good and publishable novels often don't get any further than a dozen publishers' slush piles; there are too many talented authors and shiny exciting books, and not enough publishers to provide homes for them... and until now, the economics haven't allowed more publishers to co-exist. At least, not if they want to sell more than a few hundred copies of each title, or turn a profit, or any of that stuff that's pretty much essential to keep a business going.

However, the connected world is just inviting new and innovative ways of publicising books, pushing the books into all kinds of unexpected sales and marketing channels.

It's not so much the long tail as the forward-snuffling snout.

My main interest with Fingerpress is on the IT and science fiction/dark fantasy side, but the first book out of the gate will be a mainstream novel set in post-war Germany, and based on true events. The story is hauntingly told and sometimes disturbing, seen through the eyes of a child growing up in poverty with highly dysfunctional parents. But it's also life-affirming, and shows how people can find happiness in the direst of circumstances.

On the software side of things, our first book will be ICONIX Process Roadmaps by Doug Rosenberg, which will also be available as a free ebook, unfettered by DRM.

So why not head over to the new website and hook up to the Atom newsfeed to get all the latest Fingerpress news?