Archive for the ‘process’ Category

The best tester I ever worked with

Sunday, July 9th, 2006

Reading an entry on James Bach’s blog reminded me of the best tester I ever worked with. It got me thinking about how he did it.

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On PSP and code reviews

Sunday, June 18th, 2006

Since reading about the PSP, I have continued to collect statistics. However, last week I decided to collect additional statistics related the the practice of reviewing code before compilation. The goal of this practice is to catch 100% of your compile errors before compilation by reading through the code. I was unsure about the wisdom of putting this responsibility on the programmer so I decided to gather some statistics to see if that doubt was justified.

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I’ve been trying out the PSP

Thursday, May 25th, 2006

that’s the software process, not the handheld. I’ve been reading Introduction to the Personal Software Process by Watts S. Humphrey (the creator of the process.) And I’ve been putting it into practice by gathering statistics on my current project.

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No security through stupidity

Thursday, April 27th, 2006

To twist the words of W. A. Wulf: more resources are wasted in the name of security (without achieving it) than for any other reason, including stupidity.

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It’s the routine that gets you

Monday, April 24th, 2006

It occurred to me the other day that video game characters run everywhere. I remember being chided by Lara Croft about that once. On the other hand it’s amazing how much time we waste each year doing routine tasks.

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QoL and SPI: battle of the ROI’s

Friday, April 21st, 2006

Jason Della Rocca has an article on the Escapist about investing in game developers and SPI (software process improvement.) As a game developer, I have no problem with the first part of this argument :) but the second is a minefield. SPI is too big a subject to fully cover in a single blog entry or article, but I will jot down a few thoughts raised by this issue.

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