I’m Not Anti-Constrained Random…

I’m anti-constrained random. I would never use constrained random. I think it’s an overhyped technique that doesn’t produce the results we think it does. People would be better off forgetting about it and going back to directed testing.

Ok… a little strong perhaps, but if you’ve read my posts (aka: rants) on constrained random verification, you may be assuming that’s what I think of it; that constrained random is something I’m opposed to and that I’ve turned back the clock to the directed testing stone ages.

Not true.
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Hammock Driven Design

I’ve been learning Clojure over the past few months. But that’s only slightly relevant to this post. As part of my learning process, I’ve been listening to recorded lectures from several Clojure conferences. There was one lecture by by Rich Hickey (creator of the Clojure language) called Hammock Driven Design which I found quite interesting. It’s about 40 minutes long, but I think it’s well worth a viewing.

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An Adherent Responds to the Heretic

About a year ago, Mike Thompson said that as much as he liked what Neil and I were doing with the AgileSoC, he just didn’t think the agile methodologies fit all that well with hardware. He then said that he wanted to find the time to write to us with his thoughts. I encouraged him to write a post for the AgileSoC blog promising that we would definitely post it. My reasoning is that while Neil and I are quite pro-agile, we realize that it is not a great solution for every team (just most teams). I very much wanted to hear opposing views pointing out the problems so that we could create an open discussion to either a) accept that those problems are limitations of agile; and/or b) find solutions to address those issues raised.

Thanks very much to Mike for starting this discussion.  If you haven’t seen it yet, you should read it here before you read this post! I’ll stop pestering him now for the article. We’d encourage any others to consider posting. If we let Mike have a go, we’ll likely let you too!

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