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5 replies to “A Fairy Tale from Jerry Weinberg”

  1. Bolton or Hunter, it’s always great information for testers like me.

    Jerry’s tale is fabulous and so much to learn from it for all of us.

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  2. The story is real nice. And it does make perfect sense. But as a manager, I still run into scenarios where my testers say there isn’t enough time to finish the test cycle, even after we have used up the buffer we had in place to account for delays. I doubt if any of my customers will be nice enough to sit down a listen to an interesting story! Any comments on what other managers do in these scenarios?

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  3. I’m not sure exactly what your testers are telling you. They may mean that they don’t have enough time to accomplish all the tasks that you asked them to perform. They may mean that they still have interesting questions that they could ask about the product that they haven’t yet been able to answer. They may mean that there have been problems that blocked progress at some point. They may be testing to standards that are higher than necessary to serve the project.

    No matter what your testers are telling you, if you’re a manager, it’s up to you to manage your project. It’s not up to your testers; it’s up to you. Your options–in collaboration with your client, who really gets to make the decision–include a) deeming that the uncertainty is acceptable; b) deeming that the uncertainty is unacceptable, and adding more time to get answers to the as-yet unanswered questions.

    Is the part about using up the schedule time and the buffer a surprise to you? Is it a surprise to the client? If so, why?

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  4. There appears to be a nasty bug in Blogger which allows someone to leave a post and allows me to provide a response, but which never updates the blog to reflect the comment. I don’t know why this is so, but it’s responsible for at least one other comment disappearing. I’ll try to investigate…

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  5. “Never” is a mighty long time. The comments seem to appear eventually. I believe I lost at least one comment at some point, but the ones above finally appeared.

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