A team is made of many people, but what matters, where the difference lies, is in what you bring to it. We forget to ask this question of ourselves, but when we do, when we do ask it, it almost always causes us to pause as we think of what it does the team needs from us – what can we contribute, how can we lead, what can we offer. And if you are leading…
I like to think of the old adage of hand-offs as being a very simple one. Imagine the person you are handing off your work to is you. How well will you write your comments? How much information will you fill out in the description of the story? Will you give them access to the information in the documents? How many barriers will you put in place? Start with what you want to receive, than…
You can stumble out of the blocks, you can mess it up in the middle, you can fight down the line and make every conceivable mistake along the way – and still, finish strong. But when you start again, you have to learn from everything you did before to grow. Chances are you are going to make a whole new set of mistakes, but you will have learned from the ones you made before and…
Regression testing is when you re-test everything in your suite to see if it still does the same thing it originally did (correctly). Sanity testing is the bare minimum testing that validates your core product to ensure it can do the most primal functions necessary to survive. Coverage looks at how far your testing extends – does it extend to everything you need it to reach? Leadership is knowing where, when, and how you need…
I’ve been on four projects in the last year that all had issues with Timezones, user locales, UTC, and everything else in between that relates to time and date calculations. Timezones are complex, but rarely do we deal with them at the beginning. Instead we deal with them when the first issue rolls in and then we have patch or hack the implementation because to fix them in the source would require cataclysmic changes that…