Thinking Inside a Bigger Box

This book talks about the role of a tester in an XP project. So it is about acceptance testing, not unit testing (see Test-Driven Development by Kent Beck for that).

The long and short of it is that I would really like to run an XP project with people who have read, understand, and become excited about this book. My experience is that a project suffers from not having someone who’s job is 100% quality. Programmers (myself included) will sadly have too much at stake to be effective at testing their own code. Having someone who is dedicated to acceptance testing on the team will also be a good way of keeping the iteration cycle short while delivering software of good quality.

I did notice a few weird things about the book, though. The choice of webART as an example of a web acceptance testing tool seemed to me to be a bad one. My impression from the book is that webART is a rather verbose language. The book also suggest estimating down to hours (and in some cases, below that). Personally, I don’t have enough predicability in my progress to do this, but I guess your milage may vary.

All in all, a very good book. I hope to get a tester who works with the mindset the book describes on my next project.

1. The Psychology of Computer Programming (Jerry Weinberg)


2. The Pragmatic Programmer (Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas) - from Journeyman to Master (the view of the software professional as a craftman is the only thing that will save the business!)


3. PeopleWare (Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister)


4. Extreme Programming Explained (Kent Beck)


5. After the Gold Rush (Steve McConnell)

Test-Driven Development describes in detail this technique from Extreme Programming. In addition, the author spends some time teaching the reader a useful set of mental tools for writing better code. TDD is a very fast read, but it is full of useful information. If I wanted my developers to only read one small book about software development, this would be it.

Note: The back of the book lists it as “Software Engineering/Testing”. This is incorrect. Test-Driven Development is not about testing, it is about programming.

Highly recommended.

Brilliant book. “How the Mind Works” is a tour de force over many of the puzzling aspects of the human mind:

• Why can our eyes be fooled by optical illusions?


• Why would we evolve emotions?


• Why would we evolve behaviour that makes us unable to fully control ourselves, like rage?

The book puts forth theories for all these questions and more.

The best part of the book, however, is the style in which it is written. Steven Pinker is a master at keeping the text interesting.

The main value of the book is not that it deals with these specific issues, but that teaches the reader a framework that can be used to understand the human mind: Evolutionary Psychology.

Recommended.