February 2011
2 posts
2 tags
Developer Working is not Tester Working
There is a single tester on our team. The depth of her knowledge and her attention to detail astounds us most days. She knows the edge cases, the strange behaviours and the places where our code and the real world don’t quite agree with each other. There is definite truth to the saying that if you want to know how a system works, ask the testers! Something that she has taught me is that...
4 tags
The Listening Formula
Being pegged as someone who talks too much has a devastating affect on your interactions with others. When people think you talk too much it goes way deeper than they just feel like you should utter fewer words per minute.
In their minds what you say has been devalued. Filtering the quality statements from the surplus ones is too much effort so everything you say is presumed to be garbage and...
January 2011
2 posts
4 tags
Battling the Lizard Brain (saying "I don't know")...
I am lucky enough to have landed my dream job. The work is rewarding and challenging, the food and foosball are free and the people are smart, incredibly smart, and as such everybody is a high performer.
When you combine this sort of high performance culture with human nature you get some strange behaviour. In particular you get an environment in which free thought, creativity and progress is...
7 tags
What did Unit Tests ever do for us Anyway?
Six months ago my fellow dev and I were handed a new project to work on. We had just started to work together, our domain knowledge was zero, and 50% of us (me, that is) had zero experience of C#. The significant risk that this formula involved was obvious, especially on the faces of our project manager and the division head.
Something special was required. Luckily this guy would not shut up...