Testing in an Agile development team

I have been reading up on Agile development over the last few weeks, and one thing that has concerned me when looking at Xtreme Programming is the apparent lack of dedicated testing staff. Indeed some proponents feel there is no need for any specialists at all. The view is that each developer tests their own unit of code.

But, there is much more to testing than testing individual units. There is integration and system testing as well as performance, resilience and load testing. However, the developers feel that they are not skilled enough to do anything except unit testing.

I was happy to come across a couple of sites that to me at least, put forward a more balanced approach to development and testing. One of them, testobsessed.com I have found to be particularly helpful.

burning the candle at both ends

Just sat watching the BBC news this morning and heard the item on the effects of lack of sleep. Must admit that I have recently been working late nights and early mornings (called burning the candle at both ends) especially with the unpaid work I have been doing outside of my regular employment.
Anyway, last night I went to bed earlier and clocked up a good 7 hours sleep, and must say I felt much better this morning as a result.
I notice in my reading on the Agile development methodology (philosophy/approach/paradigm?) that it is stated the team should not work more than 40 hours per week. And I can see why. Performance suffers when working longer hours.

But everyone uses Windows, don't they?

Well here's a turn-up for the books! I have been elected Treasurer of the local Interfaith Council. That is a meeting of representatives of all the different religious communities in the city - Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist and Baha'i.
I was told that it would be best to use a computer with (insert name of popular Accounting package) and when I replied that I had not used Windows system for over 10 years there was general astonishment, and a "well what else is there?". I explained that I used Linux at home for email, browsing the web, office matters like spreadsheet and document writing and I had no intention of going back to Windows just to run an accounts package. So of course, I looked for a Linux based package as soon as I got home. I have downloaded GnuCash and will be trying it out over the next few weeks. I'll let you know how I get on.

Data conversion woes

I needed to contact my utility supplier the other day. I could not get access to the web site as I hade done previously, so I ended up phoning them. The young man who answered could not have been more helpful, and more apologetic! It seems that they had moved to a new database system and this was linked to the web access. Now, with a supplier you can have a delivery address that is not the same as the address that you send bills to. It is reasonable that if one is blank then the same address is used for both.

However, the change to the web interface meant that access that was originally controlled by billing address was now controlled by delivery address, and in my case it was blank. That meant I could not access the web site until the customer support person altered the records on the database.

He said that they had spent a long time doing the change and testing it. But consider this - if you have 5 million customers and your data conversion process is 99.99% perfect that will still leave you with 500 customers whose records have failed in some way.