Debug It!

Published February 17th, 2010 Under Books | Leave a Comment

This book provides a structured approach that will help programmers to identify and remove bugs in code. It is based on a four steps process: Reproduce, Diagnose, Fix, Reflect. For each activity, the author provides practical material on how perform it. The second part gives a higher vision of the debugging process and deal with topics like communicating with users or prioritizing bugs treatment. Finally, the book discusses special situations and the relationship between bugs and other areas of software development (source control, build, etc.).

The book is easy to read and the material is presented in a very structured way with different “viewpoints” that help to understand the content. Besides the main text where important concepts are put in evidence, real life cases shows how things happen in the real world. There are also some “Joe asks…” sections where the author answer pertinent questions on the current topic.

With my many years of experience in supporting and debugging large existing enterprise systems, I have to say that Paul Butcher summarize and structure all the knowledge (and more) that I have, sometimes painfully, accumulated during this activity. This is therefore an excellent book that I will recommend to everybody that is involved in software development in general and maintenance activities specifically.

Reference: “Debug It!”, Paul Butcher, Pragmatic Bookshelf, 214 pages, ISBN 978-1934356289

Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.com
Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.co.uk

Linkopedia December 2009

Published December 23rd, 2009 Under Links | Leave a Comment

Post: Command and Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS)

Post: Programmers humor

Post: Reduce Manual Test Debt

Article: A Checklist of Questions to Consider Before Starting a Large-Scale Agile Adoption

Article: A performance benchmark method for comparing open source Java application servers

Nitrogen is an Erlang Web framework

Speed Test is a multi user test case management application

UISpec is a Behavior Driven Development framework for the iPhone

Video: Building an Automated QA Infrastructure using Open-Source Python Tools

Video: Behaviour-Driven Development

Video: Event Handling with Linq

Find more interesting links on the software development links directory, the software development tools directory, the software development articles directory, the software development blogs aggregator or the software development videos directory.

Linkopedia September 2009

Published September 15th, 2009 Under Links | Leave a Comment

Excel Spreadsheet: Value Decision Table for Measuring Business Value

The Only Truly Failed Project

Software Developers Should Never Have Dress Codes

Introduction to DDD for the implementation oriented

Tech Support Cheat Sheet

The Grinder a load testing framework

Tackle an open-source scrum tracking tool

Article: Kanban vs Scrum

Article: Grails and Continuous Integration: An Essential Combo

Article: Deployment is the Goal

Video: What they Don’t Teach You About Software at School: Be Smart!

Video: Agile Testing

Video: Storytelling Techniques

Find more interesting links on the software development links directory, the software development tools directory, the software development articles directory, the software development blogs aggregator or the software development videos directory.

Why Tester Won’t Like Agile

Published September 3rd, 2009 Under Quotes | 3 Comments

Following my thinking about the fact that functional testing was the dividing barrier between specialized developer and tester roles, I found in the book “Agile Testing” by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory an excellent list of fears that QA teams could express against agile adoption:

“Testers cling to the concept of an independent QA team for many reasons, but the main reason is fear, specifically:

* Fear that they will lose their QA identity

* Fear that if they report to a development manager, they will loose support and programmers will get priority

* Fear that they lack the skills to work in an agile team and will lose their jobs

* Fear that when they’re dispersed into development teams they won’t get the support they need

* Fear that they, and their managers, will get lost in the new organizations

We often hear of QA managers asking questions such as “My company is implementing agile development. How does my role fit in?”. This is directly related to the “loss of identity” fears.”

Source: “Agile Testing”, Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory, Addison-Wesley, 2009

No Functional Testing for the Dumb Developer ?

Published August 31st, 2009 Under Numbers | Leave a Comment

A recent Methods & Tools survey tried to evaluate the usage of tools to automate execution of functional software tests. A similar poll was conducted in 2005 and it was interesting to compare the results. Read more

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