The widespread adoption of agile methods has brought the need for effective testing into the limelight, and agile projects have transformed the role of testers. Much of a tester's function, however, remains largely misunderstood. What is the true role of a tester? Do agile teams actually need members with QA backgrounds? What does it really mean to be an "agile tester?"Two of the industry's most experienced agile testing practitioners and consultants, Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory, have teamed up to bring you the definitive answers to these questions and many others. In Agile Testing, Crispin and Gregory define agile testing and illustrate the tester's role with examples from real agile teams. They teach you how to use the agile testing quadrants to identify what testing is needed, who should do it, and what tools might help. The book chronicles an agile software development iteration from the viewpoint of a tester and explains the seven key success factors of agile testing.Readers will come away from this book understanding- How to get testers engaged in agile development- Where testers and QA managers fit on an agile team- What to look for when hiring an agile tester- How to transition from a traditional cycle to agile development- How to complete testing activities in short iterations- How to use tests to successfully guide development- How to overcome barriers to test automationThis book is a must for agile testers, agile teams, their managers, and their customers.

    Built for your brain, this book covers C# 3.0 and Visual Studio 2008, and teaches everything from language fundamentals to advanced topics including garbage collection, extension methods, and double-buffered animation. You'll also master C#'s hottest and newest syntax, LINQ, for querying SQL databases, .NET collections, and XML documents. By the time you're through, you'll be a proficient C# programmer, designing and coding large-scale applications. Every few chapters you will come across a lab that lets you apply what you've learned up to that point. Each lab is designed to simulate a professional programming task, increasing in complexity until-at last-you build a working Invaders game, complete with shooting ships, aliens descending while firing, and an animated death sequence for unlucky starfighters. This remarkably engaging book will have you going from zero to 60 with C# in no time flat.

    Written in a frank but engaging style, Debuggingprovides simple, foolproof principles guaranteed to help find any bug quickly. This book makes those shelves of application-specific debugging books (on C++, Perl, Java, etc.) obsolete. It changes the way readers think about debugging, making those pesky problems suddenly much easier to find and fix. Illustrating the rules with real-life bug-detection war stories, the book shows readers how to: * Understand the system: how perceiving the ""roadmap"" can hasten your journey * Quit thinking and look: when hands-on investigation can’t be avoided * Isolate critical factors: why changing one element at a time can be an essential tool * Keep an audit trail: how keeping a record of the debugging process can win the day

    You'll learn the principles of good product behavior and gain an understanding of Cooper's Goal-Directed Design method, which involves everything from conducting user research to defining your product using personas and scenarios. Ultimately, you'll acquire the knowledge to design the best possible digital products and services.

    Leading agile consultant and practitioner Mike Cohn presents detailed recommendations, powerful tips, and real-world case studies drawn from his unparalleled experience helping hundreds of software organizations make Scrum and agile work. "Succeeding with Agile" is for pragmatic software professionals who want real answers to the most difficult challenges they face in implementing Scrum. Cohn covers every facet of the transition: getting started, helping individuals transition to new roles, structuring teams, scaling up, working with a distributed team, and finally, implementing effective metrics and continuous improvement.Throughout, Cohn presents “Things to Try Now” sections based on his most successful advice. Complementary “Objection” sections reproduce typical conversations with those resisting change and offer practical guidance for addressing their concerns. Coverage includes: - Practical ways to get started immediately–and “get good” fast - Overcoming individual resistance to the changes Scrum requires - Staffing Scrum projects and building effective teams - Establishing “improvement communities” of people who are passionate about driving change - Choosing which agile technical practices to use or experiment with - Leading self-organizing teams - Making the most of Scrum sprints, planning, and quality techniques - Scaling Scrum to distributed, multiteam projects - Using Scrum on projects with complex sequential processes or challenging compliance and governance requirements - Understanding Scrum’s impact on HR, facilities, and project managementWhether you've completed a few sprints or multiple agile projects and whatever your role–manager, developer, coach, ScrumMaster, product owner, analyst, team lead, or project lead–this book will help you succeed with your very next project. Then, it will help you go much further: It will help you transform your entire development organization.

    You’ll learn how parallelism exploits multicore processors to speed up computation-heavy programs, and how concurrency enables you to write programs with threads for multiple interactions.Author Simon Marlow walks you through the process with lots of code examples that you can run, experiment with, and extend. Divided into separate sections on Parallel and Concurrent Haskell, this book also includes exercises to help you become familiar with the concepts presented:Express parallelism in Haskell with the Eval monad and Evaluation StrategiesParallelize ordinary Haskell code with the Par monadBuild parallel array-based computations, using the Repa libraryUse the Accelerate library to run computations directly on the GPUWork with basic interfaces for writing concurrent codeBuild trees of threads for larger and more complex programsLearn how to build high-speed concurrent network serversWrite distributed programs that run on multiple machines in a network

    Land of Lisp brings the language into the real world, teaching Lisp by showing readers how to write several complete Lisp-based games, including a text adventure, an evolution simulation, and a robot battle. While building these games, readers learn the core concepts of Lisp programming, such as data types, recursion, input/output, object-oriented programming, and macros. And thanks to the power of Lisp, the code is short. Rather than bogging things down with reference information that is easily found online, Land of Lisp focuses on using Lisp for real programming. The book is filled with the author Conrad Barski's famous Lisp cartoons, featuring the Lisp alien and other zany characters.

    It's a beautifully written tutorial that begins with the basic steps to get your first Ruby program up and running and goes on to explore sophisticated topics like callable objects, reflection, and threading. Whether the topic is simple or tough, the book's easy-to-follow examples and explanations will give you immediate confidence as you build your Ruby programming skills.The Well-Grounded Rubyist is a thoroughly revised and updated edition of the best-selling Ruby for Rails. In this new book, expert author David A. Black moves beyond Rails and presents a broader view of Ruby. It covers Ruby 1.9, and keeps the same sharp focus and clear writing that made Ruby for Rails stand out.Starting with the basics, The Well-Grounded Rubyist explains Ruby objects and their interactions from the ground up. In the middle chapters, the book turns to an examination of Ruby's built-in, core classes, showing the reader how to manipulate strings, numbers, arrays, ranges, hashes, sets, and more. Regular expressions get attention, as do file and other I/O operations.Along the way, the reader is introduced to numerous tools included in the standard Ruby distribution--tools like the task manager Rake and the interactive Ruby console-based interpreter Irb--that facilitate Ruby development and make it an integrated and pleasant experience.The book encompasses advanced topics, like the design of Ruby's class and module system, and the use of Ruby threads, taking even the new Rubyist deep into the language and giving every reader the foundations necessary to use, explore, and enjoy this unusually popular and versatile language.It's no wonder one reader commented: "The technical depth is just right to not distract beginners, yet detailed enough for more advanced readers."Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book.

    

    You'll learn techniques for implementing specific Web technologies and patterns to solve the needs of a typical company as it grows from modest beginnings to become a global enterprise.Learn basic Web techniques for application integrationUse HTTP and the Web’s infrastructure to build scalable, fault-tolerant enterprise applicationsDiscover the Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD) pattern for manipulating resourcesBuild RESTful services that use hypermedia to model state transitions and describe business protocolsLearn how to make Web-based solutions secure and interoperableExtend integration patterns for event-driven computing with the Atom Syndication Format and implement multi-party interactions in AtomPubUnderstand how the Semantic Web will impact systems design