So, is James Bach (@jamesmarcusbach) the bad boy of testing?

I flew up to Boston on Monday to lead some workshops on Continuous Integration. I checked into my room at the Hyatt and then went downstairs to see who was around. I ran into a couple of speakers milling about, and eventually joined one of them, and we headed over to the MIT Press bookstore, me to look for my Solr book. I wasn’t too sure of the name of the other speaker I was with (I asked once, but couldn’t quite remember what it was…). So we got to the book shop, I ask my fellow speaker again: James Bach. The name I was familiar with, but couldn’t quite place it… I ended up buying Parentonomics, and then we go for coffee.

So, over coffee, he asks me about what my topic is, and I gave him the brief summary of my two CI related workshops. Wow.. Little did I realize that I was sitting with the guy who rails against the “fetish” that Agile folks have for automated testing! That his entire approach to “testing” is to use skilled, motivated folks who do “sapient testing”. And I’m the guy who’s selling an approach that REQUIRES automated tests! That encourages expanding the use of automated testing!

He actually walked me through a process of talking about how to “think like a tester”, and it was really great mini-workshop.. He definitely subscribes to the socratic approach, and believes in his message, I was sweating at the end of it! That chat probably sparked more ideas in less time over that coffee then anything else this week. I also heard a lot of ideas and phrases that were echoed in Michael Bolton’s keynote later on in the week. Clearly a lot of collaboration between the two!

Probably the biggest idea that James and chatted about was the idea that automated tests really aren’t automated tests, they are automated checks. They verify that the expected behavior of the code was met. His argument that if you want to do testing, real testing, then computers, automated processes can’t meet that need, only people can.

Now, I don’t know if I believe that is completely true, but I am very aware that the “manual testing” where long test scripts written as Word documents are executed by human beings by hand are really a waste of human potential. And that those test scripts are really, to use James terms, “check scripts” because the people are not using any creativity! In fact, a lot of my interest in CI comes from the idea that people should not do monkey testing, that machines can do it much better, and my frustation with the perception that testing is a low value activity and can be easily shipped off to low skilled folks.

I think that this shift away from the term “test” for automated tests is actually happening in many places. In the Ruby world, we have libraries like Shoulda that are moving from using words like assert to other words like should. A Cucumber test really shows how controlled the space that a test needs to be to work well in an automated fashion:

Scenario: See all vendors
Given I am logged in as a user in the administrator role
And There are 3 vendors
When I go to the manage vendors page
Then I should see the first 3 vendor names

So while I don’t know if I am bought in on the idea that only people can do “testing”, and machines can only do “checking”. Tools like Heckle try to simulate aspects of what a human can do. While not suggesting that we can automate the “does my website look okay after someone changed the CSS” type of work today, in the future our automated testing will be more capable then just “checking” because we will move beyond the very constrained tests we have today to ones that mimicing the richness of the simulators that Airline Pilots use. Instead of testing the training given to pilots, we’ll be testing the robustness of software via simulations!

At any rate, James Bach, while taking a rather provocative approach to sharing his ideas, does subscribe to my favorite bullet in the Agile Manifesto: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

Here is him giving a great presentation with the subversive title of “How to Fake a Project” that was incredible entertaining, and also quite thought provoking:

What do you think? Automated testing is a fetish of the Agile community?

From the Meetup site:

We’ll look at the thriving Ruby ecosystem that has grown up around integrating with Solr. From Ruby gems that integrate with Solr like solrb and rsolr, to general search solutions like acts_as_solr and sunspot. We’ll also look at a complete “shrink wrapped” catalog solution for Solr using BlacklightOPAC.

You’ll lean the basics of getting started with Solr, and an understanding of what Ruby solutions are available to simplifying adding great search to your site!

As usual, food and beverages will be provided.

I’m very pleased to be speaking to Richmond SPIN (Software Process Improvement Network) next Wednesday October 14th, at 6:00 pm at Anthem BCBS in Richmond.  The address is 2015 Staples Mill Road in Richmond.  You can find more details and register online at:

http://www.richmondspin.org/home22222

Here’s the brief on my talk, which is based on my recent talk at Agile 2009.  I hope to see you there!

“Strategies for Persuasion on Adopting Agile”
By Arin Sime, Senior Consultant with OpenSource Connections

Do you want to know why Agile is sometimes a preferred methodology over a Waterfall method?  Arin will present 12 different methods for convincing a “traditional client” to use an Agile project plan. Based upon his own experiences with a wide variety of project styles, he will also present several definitions of each of the environments, well as results gathered from a survey on how to sell Agile. Some stories and best practices from other sources will also be covered.

Arin Sime’s presentation last week at Agile 2009 on how to sell a traditional client on an agile plan made a good impression, apparently.  First, his presentation was featured on the front page of SlideShare.

Now, he’s received an excellent writeup from Adam Goucher (we were pointed to Adam’s writeup from here).  Many thanks to Adam for the kind words about Arin’s writeup!

Arin’s next speaking engagement is at the University of Virginia’s EdUI conference on September 22, covering the Facebook API.  He’d love to see you there!

This fall I will present at the following events:

• October 3rd – Richmong Code  Camp
• October 8th – Roanoke Valley .NET User Group
• October 15th – Charlottesville .NET User Group

Hope to see y’all there. Thank You

Last night I had the pleasure of presenting ASP.NET Dynamic Data to the Richmond Software Craftmanship Group. Dynamic Data is a rich scaffolding framework that instantly web enables a database. As you might expect, it creates a database centric website. That was my first demo. My second demo showed how a Dynamic Data website can be customized and extended to become more user centric, perhaps following the user’s normal workflow. The slides and demo projects can be downloaded from my blog. The group discussedsome useful ways to apply Dynamic Data, such as simple reporting site, as a temporary application or perhaps to demonstrate a database.

I’m very pleased to be co-speaking with Wayne Graham at EdUI 2009 at the University of Virginia this September 22nd.  EdUI 2009 posted the full conference schedule today, which included the talk Wayne and I will give.  Here’s the description for our talk:

The Facebook API:  Thinking about UI in a social way

Building an application for the Facebook API is very different than your standard application. The basic concepts and flow of your application need to conform to underlying principles of social media in order for people to use your application and share it with their friends. We will discuss the development and implementation of Facebook applications based on our own experiences and drawing on the best practices of other projects. Wayne will discuss his implementation of the Facebook-Athenaeum project, and Arin will discuss his experiences building an application for fundraising on Facebook. The presentation will be a mixture of high level design concepts, details on the Facebook API, and code examples. 

We’ll be speaking on Day 2, September 22, from 2:15 – 3:00 pm.  I’m really looking forward to hearing all the great speakers at this conference, and I’m honored to have a chance to present with Wayne at EdUI!

I’ll be speaking to this Thursday’s #agilecville group meeting, about “How to sell a traditional client on an Agile project plan.” I have 11 strategies that I will go over for how to convince your clients that Agile methodologies are the way to go, and I think they cover a variety of different styles so there should be something for everyone.

When: Thursday July 16th, 6:00 PM

Where: Jefferson Room, 3rd Floor, Charlottesville Central Library (http://www.jmrl.org/li-meeting.htm)

More info and signups are on the AgileCville Google groups page.

This is all part of my lead up to speaking at Agile2009, and I’m really looking forward to tapping into the experiences and brilliance of my fellow Agile practitioners here in Charlottesville.  If you haven’t already, please take a moment to fill out my survey on how to sell Agile.  I’ll use the information I gather from this informal survey as part of my presentation.

I hope to see you there!  OpenSource Connections will provide pizza and soda!