Last Updated - 8/4/00 - Go Back
At the 8/3/00 JSL Study Group meeting we had 15 people start the Tester Project. We workd from 7:00 to 9:15PM. Here's what happened:
1. Review of Process Prescriptor (PP)
Jack's speciality is productivity and satisfaction improvement. Lately he's been working on taking his process approach to a higher level. This has taken the form of the Process Prescriptor. We reviewed the browser interface, the main idea, and then spent considerable time on the architecture. For convenience the architectural model follows:
2. Review of Mini Process 3 with XP
One of PP's Standard Prescriptions is Mini Process 3 (MP3). This is derived from XP. The main differences are we emphasize modeling more than code, we don't shun visual aids, and the entire process is well organized. MP3 is about 80% XP.
We discussed the High Level Flowchart for MP3 in great detail. Essentially it covers any multi step project, even not software. It has 3 main carefully designed partitions. It clearly shows where iterations occur in the process. Cindy pointed out it wasn't clear how the Iteration loop ended, so we fixed that. Thanks! Here's the revised diagram:
Take a look at the Iteration Cycle in green. Note the "exit criteria" for the end of each activity have been clearly defined as Task Defined, Requirements Defined, Intent Defined, Behavior Defined and Success. This sheds a little light on what Design and Implementation really do.
3. Concept Phase
Per MP3 this has required activity Nutshell Vision and optional activity Conceptual Narrative. We did both. Please note this is an educational exercise and we are time constrained, so we do not take the time for professional polish as we normally would.
Nutshell Vision - Create a lightweight tester for use in Continual Testing XP style.
Conceptual Narrative - The tester has a command line or GUI interface that allows very quick automated testing. It handles collections of tests, fixtures, threads. It can display a tree of tests and allow info per test to be displayed. It reports on test successes and failures, with red for at least one failure and green for all okay. It shows what failed and where in the code. It allows skipping a failure rather than stopping.
4. Initial Analysis Phase
Per MP3 this has 4 activities, 2 of which are optional. We did them all. Again note these are not exhaustive in the interests of time.
Key High Value Goals
- Test feedback easy to interpret
- Way to auto test GUIs
- Know exactly what caused failures
- High speed
- Test history, stored, can be reviewed
- Easily configurable
List of Use Cases
1. System Startup
2. View entire test suite in a tree manner
3. Edit test suite
4. View test suite results: summary data, detail data
5. Select subset of suite to run
6. Store test results
7. Way to compare 2 test run results
8. Explore a failure to determine exactly where it occurred
9. Specify test to run
10. Specify suite to run
11. Control number of test iterations
12. Handle threaded tests
13. Way to give it test data without modfying code
14. Choose what test data set to use for a test runList of Traits
- Ease of use
- Runs fastList of Risks
- Large team
- New to process
- Distributed team
- Time constrained team
- Process itself is new, underdocumented5. Planning Game
The purpose of this is to create a Release Plan so we can begin development of the first release. We skipped the Initial Architecture stage since this is a very small project and we want to see how well Refactoring does if architecture is skipped.
XP has simplified this activity to getting all the Story Cards, have the customer and developers understand them, then have the customer determine the priority of each, the have the customer and developers group them into releases. This went well. It strongly demonstrated the ease of working with cards instead of a computer diagram or document. We ended up with 4 groups: Mandatory, Needed, Nice and Low, which we will develop in that order.
6. Lessons Learned
At the end of each JSL meeting we take the time to identify the most important things anyone in th group learned. There were:
- People don't like to do testing
- Manual sorting of Story Cards gets people more involved, is more efficient
- Less technology is sometimes better, examples: Story Cards
- Go for small release rather than one big chunk, Big Bang
- The value of and ways to get customer more involved in the process
- Test early, test often makes debugging easier
- Afraid Mni Process 3 was getting to heavyweight, but saw it went quickly
- The lightweight process can be very effective. MP3 is definitely lightweight and cuts out stuff. People resist heavyweight processes, have to fight with them to follow a heavyweight process.
Signup for Roles
This actually occurred near the beginning of the meeting. Jack was surprised at the high level of interest in the Pair Programming learning experience, but then again, sharp cookies know this is the heart of XP.
Pair Programming - To be at Jack's house on August 5 and 6.
Sat 10-12 - Michel Bittar, Tim McCauley, Joe Nash
Sat 1-3 - Jim McLochlann, Chris Agney, Tim Youngblood
Sat 4-5 - Cindy Nelson, Valerie Zuver, Behrouz Khosrounia
Sun 2-4 - John Haeger, Doug & Michael Chambers
Sun 5-7 - Bhuvana Mahalingam, Sajan Nambiar
Roles
- Customer - Chris
- Project Mgr - Jack
- Architect - Tim Youngblood, Tim McCauley
- Tester - Cindy
Directions to Jack's House
Jack lives at 1164 DeLeon Court, Clarkston, GA 30021. Phone is 404-296-5284.
Starting from New Horizons where we meet: (I285 and LaVista on the East side of Atlanta)
1. Get on I285 going South.
2. Go about 3 miles and take the East Ponce de Leon exit.
3. Turn right on East Ponce de Leon.
4. Go 100 yards and take the first right on Creekdale.
5. Go about a mile until Creekdale deadends and turn right.
6. Go about 100 yards until that deadends and turn right.
7. Go to the 3rd house on the right, with the garden instead of a lawn.
8. Park anywhere on the street, walk up our driveway, admire Martha's garden, and we will greet you with smiles and the secret JSL handshake. :-)Note that if you are coming from South of East Ponce de Leon on I285, you will need to take the Church Street exit instead, due to the railroad. Turn left on Church Street, go about 1/4 mile, take the first right to cross the tracks, turn right on East Ponce de Leon, go about 1/2 mile and take the last left befire I285, which is Courtland. Proceed with step 5 above.