Thomas Ferris Nicolaisen's blog

Inspired by Johannes' post-its and Anders' moleskin , I'd like to share my tip'o'the day for taking notes. Step 1 : Find a stack of A3 sheets, big ones! Step 2: Get a good thick nice pen (mine could've been thicker) Step 3: Lay the sheets on your desk between yourself and your keyboard (warning, not sure this is ergonomically wise thing to do). Step 4: Whenever you show off stuff, especially code and stuff you've got on yer computer, support your presentations with drawings and notes on the sheet. Step 5: When you're done, hand the sheet off to the person you drew it for, or whenever the drawing ends up particularly pretty, smack it up on the wall behind you. Or throw it out if it's all squabbly wabbly. This way, I don't have to get up to use a flip-over, I don't have to take useless digital pics of the white-board, and I get to show off my l33t UML-skills without having to use some crappy software. Sweet! Diclaimer: I didn't come up

Lately I've become somewhat obsessed with testing . A specific kind of testing. I'm not quite sure about the term right now, but it's close to system testing, or maybe user testing. Ye know, that kind of black-box testing that makes sure your stuff works from the user's perspective. In web applications (of which I probably do about 90% of the time) they happen to blend in with web tests . I suppose it started off with last autumn when I put some thoughts on this into my lightning talk at the Smidig 2007 conference . Well, it actually started all the way back in 2006 when I did a lightning talk about Selenium in XP-meetup based on my experiences with Selenium vs. gargantuan use-case descriptions in a project ( see slides ). A few months ago I was down visiting a friend in Bonn, Germany. He works for this CMS-vendor/host called WebFactory . I offered him to drop by their workplace and do a quick demo on Selenium, as I figured they're (a) probably doing web applicat