Wayne Allen's Weblog

Johanna Rothman has written a nice article on the pitfalls of Multiprojecting. While others such as Gerald Weinberg, Jim Highsmith and Mary Poppendeick have correctly pointed out similar issues the primary thing that is missing from these discussion is why managers try to do this in the first place, and how project staff can “manage upwards” to correct or at least lessen the impact of this poor practice.

There has been a great discussion on the XP and XP-Testing mailing lists about what “tests” are and how Exploratory Testing relates to XP/Agile development.

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Jonathan Cogley asked and posted about needing an update to the NAnt Vault tasks. I can't say everything is perfect, but I have updated the code so it will compile. I don't have everything I need to fully test the changes (primarily updates to NAnt 0.8.4 and Vault 2.0), plus I had to remove the Label task since it isn't obvious how to do that with the new vault APIs.

Well for years I've avoided the hype around web services (other than building my own XML-RPC based system). Now, however, I've had 2 project in a row that were completely based on my system consuming web services. The first was Microsoft CRM which worked nicely, if slowly, from .NET client to CRM server. The second project is starting to give me fits because it is a VB6 client to .NET Web Service. The SOAP Toolkit just doesn't do it for me, plus MS is going to retire it in July '04. So I looked at PocketSOAP which works great unless there is a Guid in the WSDL, because the schema for microsoft.com/wsdl/types doesn't seem to exist anywhere that I can see.

Others have recommended this site lately. I've just had an opportunity to use it and I must say it is great!

I've posted a new article on some issues we had with story completion and steps we took to resolve them.

On a recent project we ran into an interesting problem – or rather we ran into it at the end of every iteration and especially the end of each release. The essence of the problem was the stories were “done” but the customer had not signed off on them. In non-agile shops the mantra “QA has it” is heard for the same symptom, in fact our morning stand-ups were starting to have the same flavor. For this project there are 2-3 developers for each tester and our current immature state of acceptance test automation means a full regression of our primary product takes about 1 week including automated, manual and some ad hoc testing.