Metaphors are used extensively in technical fields. I was pondering some basic questions about them, such as: What is a metaphor? What is a metaphor not? How does metaphor aid in understanding unfamiliar concepts? What is the value of metaphor in human communication? What are the limitations and risks of metaphor? Metaphors that have become defining terms Metaphors people may have forgotten are not defining terms What new metaphors have been adopted to describe emerging technologies and capabilities? How much weight should we give metaphors to help us understand technologies and capabilities (new or old)? What Is a Metaphor? According…

The original working title of this post was A teleological perspective on the reconciliation of antinomies in interpersonal interactions and the implications of reconciling ambiguities for clarity of communication and improved understanding, because I wanted something bright and punchy, but ultimately it ended up different. Hope it’s okay. TL;DR Version Notwithstanding the wide range of disparate disciplines involved, our field is characterized above all by endless, circular debate over seemingly-trivial differences in word-meanings. After many years as one of those irritating people who’s always harping on word-meanings, I’ve come around to thinking it’s not the precise use of clearly-defined words…

If you’ve met a great product person you’ve met a time traveler. The great ones, in fact, find themselves moving through the dimensions of time in the same day—sometimes even before lunch. It is essential for the success of their products that they can do this well and never get stuck in any one dimension (past, present, future) too long to neglect the needs of the other two. Is time travel for you? If your hope is to build compelling products that customer love, then you should make it a part of your routine today, and tomorrow—and yesterday. Why Time…

Previously in this series, we’ve discussed the value of unit testing shell scripts and explored how to roll our own test script, how to use the shunit2 library, how to use bash-spec for a behavioral-style approach, and how to use Pester to test-drive a Powershell script. Now we’ll look at two unit test frameworks for the server provisioning tools, Chef and Puppet. Value and Limitations of Unit Testing Provisioning Scripts In general, functional checking performed early in the delivery pipeline is faster and cheaper than checking performed later in the pipeline. The test cases can be of very small scope…

So far, in this series of posts on unit testing shell scripts, we’ve covered several tools for unit testing scripts written in common *nix shell languages like bash, korn, and zsh. The same concepts and methods apply to any shell. The tools covered so far are general-purpose test frameworks for shell languages on *nix systems: shunit2, BATS, zunit, bash-spec, and korn-spec. There are also unit testing frameworks designed to support specific use cases, like Pester (for Powershell), t-rexx (for Rexx), ChefSpec (for Chef recipes), and rspec-puppet (for Puppet). In this fourth installment, we’ll take a look at Pester, the unit…