“Once you have a project that is a few years old with a large test suite an ugly pattern emerges.

Some tests that used to always work, start “sometimes” working. This starts slowly, “oh that test, yeah it sometimes fails, kick the build off again”. If left unmitigated it can very quickly snowball and paralyze an entire test suite.” 

As leaders, sometimes managing our egos is one of the toughest challebges we face. It is the thing that when not checked is most likely to get us into trouble as well.

Automation isn't just about the tools that are used to achieve results; it is very much about the hands that perform the automation and, even more so, their minds and capacity to carry out the automation.

This is such a fun exercise because it can be created in a wide variety of ways. Ruby is a very good example of an OOPL, so I’ll cover two options: Cells as Objects, and Board as Object.

When Sherlock Holmes first meets Dr John Watson, he identifies the physician's background at a glance. To many, that moment in Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet (1887) — Holmes's debut — is a smile-worthy flight of fancy. Except it isn't entirely fantastical. One of Conan Doyle's mentors at the University of Edinburgh, UK, where he trained as an ophthalmologist, was the surgeon Joseph Bell. And it's to him that we owe the famed exchange about Afghanistan, as well as much of Holmes's character.