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NoSQL for Us


Unfortunately, last night's Cambridge Tester Meetup talk about database unit testing was cancelled due to speaker illness. No problem! We had Lean Coffee instead. Here's a few aggregated comments and questions from the group discussion.

How do you deal with internal conflicts?

  • Give overt, verbal appreciation to the other person and their perspective.
  • Be humble.
  • Leave your ego behind.
  • Conflict is healthier than the alternative. 
  • Conflict betrays a lack of common understanding.
  • I seek conflict.
  • Conflict of personality or of ideas?
  • I want to squeeze out ambiguity and lack of clarity.
  • A stand-up row can be acceptable to achieve that. (Even if it isn't the first thing I'll try.)
  • Some people avoid conflict because they feel they won't win the argument.
  • What is the source of the conflict? That makes a difference.
  • Try to keep discussion to facts; objective not subjective; technical not personal.
  • Try to get to know each other as people.
  • Try to build team spirit.
  • Change your language for different people.
  • Make yourself likeable.
  • Be assertive. That is, be calm, direct and equal.


What does Agile mean to you?

  • The Agile Manifesto is about software engineering and not about other processes.
  • Agile is a good term for marketing to upper management.
  • Extreme Programming is not a good term for marketing to upper management.
  • Agile is for projects where we don't know what we want.
  • It's for when we want to do the right thing but don't know how.
  • It's about early feedback.
  • It's about collaboration.
  • It's about being responsive.
  • Anything-by-the-book is never good.
  • "Painting by numbers doesn't teach you how to paint".
  • Most teams have 30% of their members who don't know what they're doing.
  • I'm a fan of Agile but not a fan of Scrum.
  • Teams at my work mostly use Kanban.
  • It's about knowing things will change and not going overboard on planning.

TDD Difficulty

  • So many people talk about TDD but why is it so hard to get it into use?
  • I like it and my boss likes it, but in five years we've never moved to it.
  • Why?
  • Perhaps it's too big a change for our team.
  • Perhaps no-one wants to make the effort to change it.
  • BDD is a better approach.
  • Is TDD better as personal preference than mandated practice?
  • It only matters that there are tests at the end.
  • Has anyone tried to measure the pros/cons of doing it?
  • Some people think TDD is an overhead; work without benefit.
  • TDD is about design rather than tests.
  • Is TDD really about capturing intent?

How are you using Docker in Testing?

  • To avoid having to deal with dependencies.
  • For installation testing; it's easy to get a known, repeatable environment.
  • Interested in trying to containerise test cases so that we can give something to developers to just run to see an issue.
  • Virtual machines are an unnecessary overhead much of the time.
  • Docker makes it easier to exploit all of the CPU on a host.
  • Docker is no help for kernel development and testing (if you need to use variant kernels.)
  • My team haven't found a use for it.

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