Chris McMahon's Blog

I now work for 42lines . I was hired along with Marisa Seal to start the QA/testing practice for a very small totally distributed/remote software shop implementing agile processes as they make sense. I like this place. One of the things that 42lines wants to do is to begin UI-level test automation. I have a lot of experience doing this, but I've never done it from a standing start, so this was a great opportunity to get a good look at the state of the practice for UI-level test automation. For the last 3 years or so I've been using keyword-driven test frameworks that use a wiki to manage test data . I like these wiki-based table-based keyword-driven frameworks a lot. I'm a little suspicious of the BDD-style frameworks like Cucumber and others based on rspec-like text interpretation. Anecdotal evidence suggests that analyzing the causes of failing tests within BDD-style frameworks is an onerous task; also, I suspect that since BDD-style frameworks map closely to story...

Kent Beck mentioned recently that he can't think of a situation for which Google Wave is indispensable. Jason Huggins left this amazing comment on Beck's blog post. Wave could very well be indispensable for implementing a "backchannel". A backchannel is a multi-user space for commenting on some action being shared by everyone on the channel, whether it be listening to a speaker at a conference or attending a meeting during which people take turns speaking. A backchannel is perhaps most commonly implemented on IRC, but any reasonably robust multi-user messaging tool will serve. But it's not only conference attendees that need a backchannel. Coming up I have a couple of articles recommending required communications channels for distributed teams and very large teams, wherein I strongly recommend having a backchannel during team meetings. It really is a critical core practice for distributed teams. But even given an IRC backchannel, a lot of information gets ...