The Other Boleyn Girl, by Philippa Gregory

This is the story of Henry VIII's second wife, Anne Boleyn, and her sister, Mary. Gregory takes known dates and events and weaves a rather gripping story around what might have happened to cause these to occur. So even though the ending wasn't in question, the journey was quite fun.

While amusing, the portrayal of Anne seemed inconsistent. At the outset she is clever and witty, plotting with her family to advance their station in life. When she catches Henry's eye she becomes conniving and ruthless and helps to oust a sitting queen, and when she becomes queen herself she turns into an outright shrew, shrill and unpleasant. The well-known adage "power corrupts" could be an explanation, but the intelligence shown early seems to fade with Anne becoming a caricature of the megalomaniac queen.

The writing style is straightforward, with a minimum of flowery romance-speak—something I appreciated. A bit long, but the action moves quickly enough it doesn't feel like a 650+ book. More entertainment than biography, this makes me want to read a more factual account of the time. Certainly kept my interest, and well worth the time it took to read.

First Sentence:

I could hear a roll of muffled drums.

Agile Testing, by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory

Agile isn’t about speed, it is about quality. While speed is obviously an attractive element of the methodology, if the resulting software is buggy then it doesn’t really matter how quickly it gets released. For many teams, especially young ones, how to work QA into a sprint cycle isn’t clear. This book is an excellent treatise into how testing and agile can work hand in hand.

Unlike waterfall processes, there usually isn’t a separate team responsible for testing in agile. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a place for traditional QA personnel, though; in fact, a QA skill set is even more important because without a dedicated test team, developers end up doing more of the testing work. With dev executing test cases, the QA folks can apply themselves to exploratory testing, usability testing, and generally non-developer-think testing. The authors state “successful projects are a result of good people allowed to do good work;” this mix of skills and duties is what allows for both speed and quality to be maintained in a project.

What makes this book great, though, is that it covers not only roles and methods of agile testing, but metrics as well. Metrics are always an interesting topic in agile, because each self-organizing team will have different methods, making measurements difficult to standardize. The authors recognize this, and wisely warn against reading too much into the measures, too. “Having the number of unit tests go up every day is a nice bit of feedback... However, it is important to recognize that the number itself means nothing.” In this sense, the implication is that a large number of useless tests doesn’t add value, even if the metric is always increasing.

Easy to read, Gregory and Crispin have authored a very useful reference that should be on the shelf of every agile team.

First Sentence:

“Agile” is a buzzword that will probably fall out of use someday and make this book seem obsolete.