We’ll Try

We recently got some questions about the story “We’ll Try”. Send us your questions!

The article assumes that the deadline is fixed and that the client should trade off the project objectives. It seems to ignore the possibility that there are other things the client might want to trade off such as cost and deadline or more complex issues like aspects of quality such as maintainability, flexibility, reliability, usability, etc.

Quality Assurance

A very experienced QA manager recently emailed me some tough questions. Here they are, with are my answers. As always, comments and further questions are welcome!

Absence of Errors

You XP guys advocate testing, not inspections or program proofs. Everyone knows that testing can only show that errors exist, not that they don’t.

Tradeoffs

We have Worst Things First, which tells us what to worry about. On the other hand, our division of responsibilities tells us that the customer decides which stories to work on. Does WTF only apply within the particular story we have in hand now, or do we somehow exercise programmer forethought in deciding what we need to worry about?

ENVY Discipline

Here’s a quick list of ENVY guidelines:

Always work under the name of one of the two people presently pairing. If you are logged in as someone else, everyone will have trouble sorting out where your code is.
Version frequently.

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