Ants on the Melon
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Today Todd and I attended the first half of a Software Testing and Quality Assurance training session at the University of Texas at Austin. It was a really good session, although we were probably the youngest people in the room by at least 10 years. Of the 22 people at the session, only 4 (including us) were developers. All the other organizations that were represented there actually have full-time testing and quality assurance specialists. Throughout the day several things about software development became clear to me. Although it would seem obvious, the concept of division of labor is as important to software development as it is to anything else. The instructor did not mention the division of labor, but as she discussed “filters” between the different stages of a software project, I noticed that none of what she suggested for a testing process was possible when a single person has a role in multiple stages. It is important that the people that collect requirements are different from those who write the code, and that different people test the product. If a single person, or a small group of people, tries to perform all of these duties, the product will only represent a single perspective of the solution (and the perspective of a developer, at that!). By forcing the software to flow through people of different skills and perspectives, it is easier to discover points of confusion that could impact end users. End users are often sufficiently confused with software anyway, there is no need for that situation to become any worse.

After the session Todd and I visited Eurway to check out some furniture, and then headed over to Chuy’s for dinner. We decided to drive downtown to try to find a coffee shop with wireless. We came across Austin Java, a super cool little coffee shop/restaurant/hangout that had everything we were looking for:

• Free wireless access (they even use Airport Extremes )
• Beer for Todd
• Coffee and Tea for me
• A great atmosphere

So here we are…

Tomorrow we will be attending the second half of the training session and heading back to San Antonio. I am really exciting about getting back to work to put together a mini presentation for the rest of the team about what we have learned here.