Wayne Allen's Blog

Patrick Logan writesabout the debate regarding whether software development is a craft or engineering. He has an interesting spin in that what makes software seem "craft-like" is the informalities. I think the "informality" of software makes it fee… more »

A teaser from Clarke's book. If you want to know what the secret ingredient is take a look at his Sticky Minds article. Craig interrupted my thoughts, "It doesn't surprise me that you are in the mess you are in. My education and experience are in Qua… more »

Just got word today that I am now a Certified Scrum Master! more »

I had a need (creating CSV BCP files) that required knowing the column names of a MS SQL table in the order they were created. Some inspiration from Mark Clerget and a little fooling around with SQL Query Analyzer resulted in the following. DECLARE @c v… more »

Bill Caputo has a wonderfully clear explanation of how to address questions regarding using TDD at system boundaries. TDD is fundamentally about writing tests (or 'checked examples' as Brian Marick calls them) before you write the code. One of the… more »

Thanks to Patrick Logan I now know what Skiplists are. Skip lists are an ingenious data structure that turns a linked list into a data structure that offers the same running time as the more complex self-balancing tree data structures... In the lat… more »

Elisabeth Hendrickson has a great post about the practicalities of agile testing where she takes Brian Marick's breakdown of testing vectors and talks about what to actually do differently to achieve agility in testing. Agile project teams generall… more »

Cliff Atkinson has recently produced several microcasts (using Camtasia)demonstrating several key aspects of his new book "Beyond Bullet Points". I've enjoyed Cliff's eye opening series on how to make stunning PowerPoint presentations. Hidden Storyb… more »

You record the Superbowl on the PVR so you can watch the commercials, but your wife makes you watch some of the plays... more »

I've come to rely on this great little utility from Steve Miller. Have you ever copied some text from a web page, a word document, help, etc., and wanted to paste it as simple text into another application without getting all the formatting from the… more »