Specials

Nist 800-63b has recommended against password complexity requirements like “special characters” for almost 10 years now. Why are such requirements still with us?

Archeology

How often do programmers do “git archeology?” That is, dig through the history of the codebase (and bug tracker) to find the root cause of a problem? Source control and bug trackers can make such analysis easy, but I rarely see it in practice.

Testers

Around 2010, talk of Test-Driven-Development was everywhere, meaning test automation. What fraction of the motivation was an earnest attempt to improve quality, versus programmers wanting to push testers out of the development process?

TDD is a developer-activity. It does NOT replace testers or acceptance tests. TDD is not “test automation.” It is the software equivalent of of “measure twice, cut once.”

…I do agree that most devs don’t really understand it, and write tests only to fulfill a management requirement for test coverage. That’s not even close to TDD.

—RG

I’m not sure if this addresses the original question. I’ll have to revisit, but it’s clear that people mean different things when they say “test-driven development.”

TDD is fulfilled by developers BUT it should be specified by the BA & TEST QA

The dev should be in the room to call out edge cases or automation improvements

The 3 Amigos principle applies

I have over the years seen the time split

BA 60%

Dev 30%

Test 10%

And it NEVER worked

—PA

PA must come from a very different background than mine. Testing specified by the Business Analyst and Tester certainly is not what I’ve heard called “tdd,” and I’ve never seen “Business Analysis” explicitly given such a large fraction of the schedule.

Ammo

.30 cal/7.62 ammo cans are the perfect size for storing your collection of testing phones, and less flammable than a shoebox.

Shoehorn

Every once in a while, I see somebody shoehorn a bug tracker into Git, but there is at least one source control system that’s has an integrated bug tracker as a first-class feature: Fossil. Are there others?

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