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Practitioner Story: Test Early and Often with External Development |
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30/03/2009 |
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It is well known that software defects found late are more costly to resolve. Hence the Software Testers’ edict ‘test early and test often’.
However, ‘test early and test often’ is sometimes easier said than done. Take for example an organisation that uses an external provider for software development. The organisation can only test as early and as often as they get
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Practitioner Story: Hitting the Delivery Date |
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13/11/2008 |
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Any piece of work, big or small, complex or simple, will benefit from having a tightly managed delivery date that is difficult or impossible to move.
Equinox recently played a central role helping a client to achieve the on time delivery of Phase 1 of a major programme of work. We continue to fulfil a number of roles on the Programme, including the role of Programme Director which is occupied by one of our senior
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Practitioner Story: Project Success with Continuous Integration and TDD |
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23/07/2008 |
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On our software development projects we regularly use approaches such as continuous integration and test driven development (TDD), with a number of advantages. Even if you are not a developer you should be aware of and encourage these approaches on your projects as they may impact the overall success of your project.
For continuous integration our developers commit their code frequently to a source code management tool (SCM).
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Practitioner Story: Start by Understanding the Problem |
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26/06/2008 |
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We often frame our understanding of a situation based on what is tangible – systems, screens, reports, and data. Business users may also present their needs to us in these terms. Before we know it we are documenting requirements that address symptoms, that prescribe a solution, but that ultimately miss the root cause business problems or opportunities.
We encounter this scenario quite often during client consulting
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Practitioner Story: No more "the defect cannot be reproduced" |
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22/05/2008 |
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Software Developers love the five words "the defect cannot be reproduced". They have an incentive to say these words. By doing so the Developer advocates responsibility for resolving the problem and passes ownership back to the Software Tester. As a result, Software Testers despise the five words "the defect cannot be reproduced".
On a recent Equinox software project one of our Software Testers provided an innovative solution to
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Practitioner Story: Innovative Requirements Documentation |
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16/04/2008 |
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Can we work smarter to achieve greater efficiency on projects? A recent Equinox software project involved one business analyst who had just one month to generate the requirements. Much of the month was taken up with requirements workshops, analysis and communication, meaning that documentation activities needed to be performed quickly and efficiently.
The analyst used the full repository features of the Sparx Systems Enterprise
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Practitioner Story: Performance Test Early and Often |
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19/02/2008 |
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Equinox gets involved in many performance testing engagements. Performance testing identifies whether an application has acceptable speed and stability when placed under predicted peak loads within an automated test environment. Often an application may be functionally correct, but not perform under load. While knowing that the system does not meet performance goals is useful, the most valuable contribution the team makes is diagnosing the
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Practitioner Story: Scrum with 20 Day Sprints |
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17/01/2008 |
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We are currently engaged on a software development project for a client and have chosen to use the agile Scrum approach for the project. Scrum was chosen due to the characteristics of the project - high-level and changing business requirements, the need to interface to a product under-development, the opportunity to co-locate business people and developers together, and business buy-in to the approach.
The project is split into
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Practitioner Story: Pragmatic System Testing |
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04/12/2007 |
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We recently used an 'exploratory testing' approach on an Equinox software development project. Exploratory testing is a less formal testing approach where test design, execution, and logging are performed concurrently, based on a test charter. In this instance the software had already been through previous iterations with more formal testing. Using the exploratory approach the tester spent most of their budgeted time 'on task' performing test
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Schering-Plough Animal Health Limited |
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30/11/2007 |
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Redevelopment project a 'meeting of minds'
When Schering-Plough Animal Health Limited (Schering-Plough) needed to redevelop and upgrade their customer loyalty rebate system – they chose Equinox. Equinox developed the original system 10 years ago and has maintained an intimate knowledge of the system through the annual support agreement it has with Schering-Plough.
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Practitioner Story: Pragmatic Value from Modelling |
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11/10/2007 |
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The requirements on a recent Equinox software development project centred on the need for complex workflow functionality. Each step in the workflow had rules and gateways and as we moved into design we identified the need for a more complete understanding. To visualise and clarify all of the conditions and states, we modelled the workflow using a UML State Diagram in Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect. This had many benefits - allowing us to
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