Thoughts from a Thirsty Bear

Have you ever noticed how some teams do not have a "buzz"? That certain energy that differentiates a good team from a great team. Anyone who has worked for any length of time in software will almost certainly have experienced the lacklustre plod of a team in crisis. But there is a rarer but not unknown phenomenon created by the further collapse of teamwork and common sense. I call it the Black Hole Team. Here, all joie de vivre has been crushed out of the team. All hope of changing, evolving and improving working practices has been extinguished. Team members are simply coding zombies, attending work not out of pleasure or professional pride, but instead simply to churn out second rate code that gets them from 9 o'clock to 5. By this stage the team has become so dense (sic) that new team members have the life and energy actively sucked out of them until there is just the shell left. So just how does a team collapse to this level? The ways are many and varied, but common

This is documented elsewhere, but here it is again: The problem - you want to test a web site where you get a popup to accept an unrecognised certificate, eg when using a self-generated certifictate. Selenium cannot click on the resulting confirmation window, but worse still Selenium does not store your decision even though you have selected 'permanently accept' manually the first time. The solution - basically Selenium is launching a clean copy of the browser each time. So you need to create a persistent profile to use each time. As far as I know this is only possible with Firefox. Create a new Firefox profile (firefox.exe -profileManager). In this case the name of the new profile is selenium-https-profile Add the certificate to it Add a suitable .pac to redirect to the SeleniumServer function FindProxyForURL(url, host) { if(shExpMatch(url, '*/selenium-server/*')) { return 'PROXY localhost:4444; DIRECT'; } } Start the server ja

How familiar does this sound? Your Friendly Neighbourhood Architect flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps all over the design without any sort of interaction with the user or codebase and flies out leaving the Team to tidy up as best they can.... Unfortunately Seagull Architects are still out there causing a nuisance on all types of project, not just agile. So please, Do Not Feed the Seagulls.... (Note - there are unconfirmed reports that Seagull Architects are evolving. Into Vulcan Architects. Here they walk in, Vulcan-mind-meld with the requirements and codebase (again without any real interaction with customer or real world code), and announce the design required. "That's illogical, Captain")