Quality is infectious

In his recent post - Quality-Speed Tradeoff — You’re kidding yourself, Ron Jeffries has explained how high quality is mandatory in order to achieve high delivery rate. There are many reasons for quality issues in a product, inherent technical complexity, lack of skill or just plain laziness. However an over looked factor that really hurt quality is pure pressure. When the pressure to deliver rises above a certain level (which vary for people and teams) the team starting to cut corners. When pressed developers will deliver. However we are not magic workers. When pressed we usually starts by working longer and harder, but when that's not enough, the only option left is to compromise current quality in the hope that part of the work can be delayed after the delivery. The mistake involved is...

Read more »

Posted in: Development Practices,Random Thoughts

WPF Testing - Part I

Automating GUI testing is always a tricky business. In fact its so hard that people tend to mark it off as too hard to bother with. I believe however that this observation is not correct. During one of my consulting gigs I was starting to instruct a new team on the concepts of unit tests and since they working on a real product they actually have some GUI involved (imagine that).If that's not enough they are using WPF as their framework of choice. I on the other side cant claim to be a GUI expert (to say the least) and my hands on experience with actual WPF code is, well, close to nothing. I couldn't leave it at that, so I invested some time in actually trying to figure out how one can write tests for WPF based GUI. This post (which hopefully...

Read more »

Posted in: GUI Testing,Isolator,TDD,tools,Unit Test Patterns,WPF