quotes
When advice turns out to be a mistake
I remember reading Clinton Keith’s “Agile Game Development” and getting to an anecdote about CCP Games, where I worked at the time. The following is from a Gamasutra repost of the book’s “Teams” chapter: In the fall of 2008, CCP undertook the development of its tenth expansion pack called...
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Anxiety causes selfish behavior
BPS Research Digest is a great site, highly recommended for anyone interested in why people behave the way that they do. A little while ago, they reported on a study where anxious participants were more likely to cheat and excuse their own unethical behavior than the control group. When...
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Automated testing shows a respect for employees
In the tech-artists.org G+ community page there was a comment on a thread about unit testing: A key factor in TA tools is the speed at which we need to deliver them, and our audience is considerably smaller than, say, engine tools code. Therefor it becomes somewhat hard to...
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How do you estimate that which you’ve never done?
Have you heard about #noestimates? No? Well I’m sure you can guess what it is anyway. But reading the debates reminded me of a story. While at Game Developer’s Conference a few years ago, I was arguing about estimation with a certain project manager, who, despite having no actual...
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Change should be the ally of quality
In The Beauty of Testing, Steven Sinofsky writes: …great testers understand one the cardinal rules of software engineering—- change is the enemy of quality. This is not a cardinal rule. This is a outdated and obsolete mode of thinking. Change is how you discover great UX. Change is how...
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Technical debt metaphors get it so wrong
In my previous post about technical debt, I explained how modern definitions of technical debt are harmful. Now I turn my attention to equally harmful metaphors. Viktoras Makauskas made the following metaphor in a comment on my last post. This is a pretty perfect stand-in for metaphors I’ve read...
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More effective interviews
David Smith over at baleful.net makes some interesting points about the length of most interviews: So mathematically, you will most likely get the highest confidence interval with: 1) Resume screen, 2) Phone interview, 3) In-person interviews 1-3. From the above, this should represent about 50% of the total causes,...
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We’re not so different, you and I
Ben Sandofsky wrote a post about why QA departments are still necessary, specifically with regards to mobile app development. He makes a good point: mobile apps create a distribution bottleneck that makes very rapid iteration impossible. I agree, and this is a good angle to think about. I would...
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Grabbing for good enough
Uncle Bob, who I consider my favorite programming writer, had a post a few weeks ago titled “Thorns around the Gold“. In it he describes how writing tests for your core functionality first can be harmful. Instead, Uncle Bob prefers to probe for “thorns” around the “gold” first. I...
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The QA Department Mindset
From this post by Rands, titled “The QA Mindset”: At the current gig, there’s no QA department. […] My concern is that the absence of QA is the absence of a champion for aspects of software development that everyone agrees are important, but often no one is willing to...
