NoSQL for Us

Unfortunately, last night's Cambridge Tester Meetup talk about database unit testing was cancelled due to speaker illness. No problem! We had Lean Coffee instead. Here's a few aggregated comments and questions from the group discussion.

How do you deal with internal conflicts?

Give overt, verbal appreciation to the other person and their perspective.
Be humble.
Leave your ego behind.
Conflict is healthier than the alternative.
Conflict betrays a lack of common understanding.
I seek conflict.
Conflict of personality or of ideas?
I want to squeeze out ambiguity and lack of clarity.
A stand-up row can be acceptable to achieve that. (Even if it isn't the first thing I'll try.)
Some people avoid conflict because they feel they won't win the argument.
What is the source of the conflict? That makes a difference.
Try to keep discussion to facts; objective not subjective; technical not personal.
Try to get to know each other as people.
Try to build team spirit.
Change your language for different people.
Make yourself likeable.
Be assertive. That is, be calm, direct and equal.

What does Agile mean to you?

The Agile Manifesto is about software engineering and not about other processes.
Agile is a good term for marketing to upper management.
Extreme Programming is not a good term for marketing to upper management.
Agile is for projects where we don't know what we want.
It's for when we want to do the right thing but don't know how.
It's about early feedback.
It's about collaboration.
It's about being responsive.
Anything-by-the-book is never good.
"Painting by numbers doesn't teach you how to paint".
Most teams have 30% of their members who don't know what they're doing.
I'm a fan of Agile but not a fan of Scrum.
Teams at my work mostly use Kanban.
It's about knowing things will change and not going overboard on planning.

TDD Difficulty

So many people talk about TDD but why is it so hard to get it into use?
I like it and my boss likes it, but in five years we've never moved to it.
Why?
Perhaps it's too big a change for our team.
Perhaps no-one wants to make the effort to change it.
BDD is a better approach.
Is TDD better as personal preference than mandated practice?
It only matters that there are tests at the end.
Has anyone tried to measure the pros/cons of doing it?
Some people think TDD is an overhead; work without benefit.
TDD is about design rather than tests.
Is TDD really about capturing intent?

How are you using Docker in Testing?

To avoid having to deal with dependencies.
For installation testing; it's easy to get a known, repeatable environment.
Interested in trying to containerise test cases so that we can give something to developers to just run to see an issue.
Virtual machines are an unnecessary overhead much of the time.
Docker makes it easier to exploit all of the CPU on a host.
Docker is no help for kernel development and testing (if you need to use variant kernels.)
My team haven't found a use for it.

Image: https://flic.kr/p/8S4jMj

Comments

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