Thursday, January 13, 2011

Extreme Characters and Soap Opera Testing

I'm reading Mike Cohn's book User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development in order to switch my mind set into the Agile Development mode for the coming year(s). I recommend this book for people doing agile development.

Extreme Characters is a concept the book introduces. Mike correctly states that it will not be useful for most project but it is worth knowing about. I agree. But it got me thinking. Wouldn't Extreme Characters fit into Soap Opera Testing perfectly.

Cohn sites Djajdiningrat, J.P., W.W. Gaver and J.W. Fres, "Interaction relabelling and Extreme Characters: Methods for exploring aesthetic interactions." Symposium on Designing Interactive Systems 2000, 2000:66-71. See poster for the article.

A 5 minute google didn't turn up much of anything detailed on Extreme Characters other than what Mr. Cohn wrote/teaches. Food for thought and grounds for further research.

(Cool. I bought the Kindle ebook and read in on my laptop at work or on the Kindle at home. It is also sitting on my iPhone should I want to make a quick reference during a stand up.)

Saturday, January 1, 2011

Sutter Gold Mine tour

Saw a flyer for the cave tours in California at the coffee shop this morning. The Sacramento Magazine said that if you are going to die in Sacramento the Sutter Gold Mine tour is one of fifty things you must do before you die.

We decided that next time the Simpkins are in town we'll make this a day trip.

Looks like there are a few caves for tourist in California. I challenge Crawford to a zip line race, First one to hit the ground wins.