Chris McMahon's Blog

Elisabeth Hendrickson and her colleagues with Quality Tree Software have announced the opening of Agilistry , their 'immersive training space' in Pleasanton California. I've been following Elisabeth's announcements along the way to making this happen, and from what I can tell, the Agilistry facility is set up as real agile working space... except conceived and designed from the ground up by some of the most intelligent, experienced agile practitioners in the world today. When I think of "training space" for software, I think of a trainer behind a podium with a whiteboard and a projector and some handouts, with trainees sitting at tables facing the podium. This isn't that. Agilistry isn't training space at all; Agilistry is *practice* space. It even says so on the web site: "Agilistry Studio; a practice space for Agile software development" And I'll bet that not many people know how to use a practice space. For beginners, practice space i...

Marisa Seal and I have officially taken over maintenance of Gojko Adzic's 'WebTest' project. If you want to know why, I wrote about it here . Marisa is doing the coding (so far; I've never written any Java and would like to learn) and I'm being something like a Customer. I've used similar tools in the past, and I know what I want this tool to do. Eventually we're going to need documentation for our first release (0.9?), so it seems like a good idea to write down what we're doing, and this seems like a fine place to do it. The first thing is that we want to change the name of the project to avoid confusion over the other tool with the same name, Canoo WebTest . My favorite so far is 'Selenesse'. Not only does it give a sense of the bridging nature of the tool, it also is very close to the word for the high-level selenium language known as 'Selenese', and since Selenium borrowed a lot of structure from Fitnesse early on, it'...

Many of the members of the writing-about-testing group are also experienced telecommuters. It turns out that a number of us have had bad experiences when telecommuting for organizations that lack a sane and rational telecommuting policy. So we wrote one. The following document has been through more than 80 revisions and contains text contributed by 5 separate authors, and also reflects the comments of even more participants. We hope you find a generic telecommuting policy useful. Telecommuting Policy Some organizations want to offer telecommuting as an amenity for work/life balance. Other organizations do not want to have to rely on local talent to build exceptional teams. Other organizations want to use telecommuting to reduce the cost of infrastructure such as office space. Regardless of the reason, any organization wishing to succeed with telecommuting must have a policy for handling remote working. An institutional standard must be in place such that everyone telecommuting...