Week in Review - 2010-28
I finally got a new battery for my laptop - it only took 3 weeks rather than the estimated 6, so finally I'm back online - on the train. It's barely doing the job though, a new battery barely gets me to and from work - I obviously need to work closer to home! I'm running Ubuntu, Netbeans, Grails, and sometimes a 3G internet connection - so I guess it is working hard for what is sometimes more than a 2 hour round trip!
It will be interesting to see how the new battery lasts. I'm also thinking about getting a new laptop at the end of the year - my current laptop is over 2 years old, so technology wise it's out of date. The DELL Adamo looks interesting, with a SSD disk - I'd love to see how much difference that makes, otherwise I'd probably get an Inspiron 13z - I'm mainly interested in the smaller lighter models since I'm so mobile. Its nice to see laptops coming without DVD drives now - who needs them?
I found an interesting whitepaper on Agile Testing. It describes how different the testing role is in an Agile environment. Worth reading, but as always you never get the full picture from one source, so also check out StickyMinds, InfoQ and Pragmatic Programmers.
We've been having interesting debates at work about how to move forward towards being more Agile. I'm on a Scrum project at the moment and I am a lot happier now that the project management is sorted out, but we need to get better at our development practices. It seems so hard though, convincing others to buy into things that seem so reasonable - so much harder than it should be. And if the others aren't motivated how do you make progress by yourself? I've tried just doing it with the hope that it will motivate the others, but they just don't get excited about it like I do. I've got things to learn here, so if you have any advice or strategies please feel free to comment.
It will be interesting to see how the new battery lasts. I'm also thinking about getting a new laptop at the end of the year - my current laptop is over 2 years old, so technology wise it's out of date. The DELL Adamo looks interesting, with a SSD disk - I'd love to see how much difference that makes, otherwise I'd probably get an Inspiron 13z - I'm mainly interested in the smaller lighter models since I'm so mobile. Its nice to see laptops coming without DVD drives now - who needs them?
I found an interesting whitepaper on Agile Testing. It describes how different the testing role is in an Agile environment. Worth reading, but as always you never get the full picture from one source, so also check out StickyMinds, InfoQ and Pragmatic Programmers.
We've been having interesting debates at work about how to move forward towards being more Agile. I'm on a Scrum project at the moment and I am a lot happier now that the project management is sorted out, but we need to get better at our development practices. It seems so hard though, convincing others to buy into things that seem so reasonable - so much harder than it should be. And if the others aren't motivated how do you make progress by yourself? I've tried just doing it with the hope that it will motivate the others, but they just don't get excited about it like I do. I've got things to learn here, so if you have any advice or strategies please feel free to comment.