Ward Cunningham

Ward redirects here; there is also Ward.com.

Contents

edit Bio

Ward Cunningham is the Chief Technology Officer of AboutUs.org, a growth company hosting the communities formed by organizations and the people they touch. Ward co-founded the consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc., has served as a Director of the Eclipse Foundation, an Architect in Microsoft's Patterns & Practices Group, the Director of R&D at Wyatt Software and as Principal Engineer in the Tektronix Computer Research Laboratory. Ward is well known for his contributions to the developing practice of object-oriented programming, the variation called Extreme Programming, and the communities supported by his WikiWikiWeb. Ward hosts the Agile Manifesto. He is a founder of the Hillside Group and there created the Pattern Languages of Programs (PLoP) conferences which continue to be held all over the world.

edit Web Pages

edit Contact Info

edit Work in Progress

edit Favorite Communities

edit Wiki Love

I am making an effort to contribute to other wiki sites.

edit Eclipse Foundation

I'm lucky to have to choose between great job opportunities. I'm very proud of the practical programming I did at Eclipse, even though programming wasn't my job. Here I will say a few words about that part of my recent history.

Here is a 12 part series of blog posts where I describe the automation we deployed over a period of a few months.

In part 3 I start talking about the most exceptional aspect of the project: visualizing automated test results. This has proven to be an excellent approach to test automation for these reasons:

  • We test the objects that make up a page, not the server that serves the page. This lets us engage in a conversation with the very elements that we "own". As such, it is easy for our visualizer to ask a few questions that a web server wouldn't.
  • We look at a single page and watch the flow of interaction among many people over many days. We see on that page the very screens that these people will be reading. And, again, because we are viewing the objects directly, we see only the parts of the screens that matter.
  • We annotate the diagram with additional useful information such as system resources consumed at each step or variations on the steps to be considered in other tests.
  • We switch smoothly to and from interactive use of the application and viewing it on the single page visualizations. With one click we reconfigure the interactive databases to reflect a chosen point of view and place in time. This allows us to "explore" our work without the tedium of getting to a place of interest.
  • We choose to write tests because we can feel our development pace speed up the minute that we do. The payback for the the modest effort is immediate, not just some downstream point in maintenance.

Aside: The Portland office started in the US Bank building where we often ate in the restaurant on the 30th floor. We returned there one more time for a good-bye lunch. These photos show the aging geeks that showed up and include shots of the beautiful view that include the current Eclipse office and the future AboutUs office in one scene.

edit Agile Testing Workshop

This is my introduction to the participants of the Agile Alliance's workshop on functional testing. Careful readers will find a position statement in here somewhere:

Friends -- I'm excited about our upcoming workshop. I feel that we could easily set direction that could impact a decade. I'm also a great fan of the LAWST format which I learned from Brian and have now experienced a half dozen times. It has to be the most effective use of smart people for the common good I've yet encountered.

I am the original author of Fit who's history is summarized in the link that follows. This is a history of custom test infrastructure. Fit was my attempt to offer some standards that were simple and general enough to unify the practice. I'm happy that it serves to define a style of test but disappointed that it lacks sticking power. Brian (again) influenced me with a provocative blog post asking why people won't keep up Fit tests even when they have them. Why indeed?

http://fit.c2.com/wiki.cgi?FrameworkHistory

With Brian's observation in mind, I wrote another test framework, this time tightly coupled with a small but highly leveraged portal application for the Eclipse Foundation. With the freedom one has in one-off code, I sought to explore what further utility one could gain from agile-style functional tests as the basis of collaboration, an idea at the heart of Fit. I will be reporting on this work at PNSQC. You can find my paper and some slides too. The slides, I will warn you, were written this summer for a research organization that expected me to talk about wiki. I'm revising them today for the PNSQC audience.

http://c2.com/pnsqc2007/

Elisabeth, more than anyone, has taught me practical techniques of the exploratory testing. With her in mind I added the capability to switch between scripted and exploratory testing. This required some db manipulation code that developers might not be eager to write if they don't understand the benefits that accrue to both development and (I hope) testing.

Best regards. -- Ward

edit Long Live Brand

First presented within the Agenda for 2nd Quarter Stakeholder Meeting and now with community contributions

  • Brand is dead
    • Market is conversation (Cluetrain)
    • Have to let go (PJ report)
    • Brand hijack
  • Brand was born
    • When organizations replaced individuals
    • Future of Chain-Store in America -- my dad
  • Brand building
    • Human accumulation of experience, trust
    • Ad campaign: repetition of emotional experience
    • Too many organizations, too fluid of relationships
  • Brand in the network era
    • Conversation
      • Sequence of actions by real people
      • Collaboration of identity forms new organization beyond visible logo
      • Tagging allows for deconstruction of conversations
      • Visible history
    • Reputation
      • Trust networks
      • Human in the loop
  • Wiki is sufficient
    • People, things and actions
    • Topsoil is better
  • Long live brand
    • We will host deep branding for all organizations
    • Organizations, trust, and thus brand is life sustaining in this century

See also Wikipedia extremely influential.

edit Placement Preference

In what order would a domain owner prefer various search results to be ranked? What would be the basis of his preference? Brian at Madrona.com suggests the following:

  1. Own domain, because he has full control of this
  2. AboutUs.org, because he has some direct control
  3. Every other site, because only his marketing and p.r. influence them

edit Thought Leadership

Here I will collect posts and pages that offer better explanations of my ideas than I have mustered on my own.

edit Claims

edit My Blogroll

DailyBuzz [ Add Your DailyBuzz ]
Twitter the DailyBuzz!!

edit Wednesday, 14 May 2008

edit Wednesday, 07 May 2008

edit Tuesday, 06 May 2008

edit Tuesday, 29 April 2008

  • Late notice, I know, but Silicon Forest has been the Wikipedia/WikiProject Oregon Collaboration of the Week for a while. (The word "week" is treated very loosely in this context!) I suggested this collaboration a while back, because I thought a good article on the Silicon Forest would be a nice complement to the Portland Tech portal. So, I encourage AboutUs'er's to get on over and get to work! -Pete 20:20, 29 April 2008 (PDT)

edit Monday, 28 April 2008

edit Friday, 25 April 2008

edit Tuesday, 22 April 2008

edit Monday, 21 April 2008


AboutUs is a wiki for and about businesses and organizations, with info on websites and your community. Come see why the knowledge of many makes us one of the fastest-growing and most powerful sites on the web today. Anybody can edit our pages, it's Easy!

edit Saturday, 19 April 2008

AboutUs is search result for the term wikiflu! The link. --Nick Burrus [ Talk - Contribs ] 02:57, 19 April 2008 (PDT)

edit Thursday, 17 April 2008

Thought for the day:

edit An Award for Ward

Our very own Ward Cunningham got a prestigious honor for his technology contributions today (which include creating the first wiki). Ward received the Mayor's Technology Award for "exceptional innovation and vision in technology" from Portland, OR Mayor Potter. The award, given annually, was presented at the InnoTech Conference, a business and technology innovation conference held this week in Portland.

edit Wednesday, 16 April 2008

edit Tuesday, 15 April 2008

  • After our Stakeholder Meeting today, I stayed up on IRC and talked with the majority of WikiCoaches and a few community members about the way we envision the organization of the "WikiCoaching" work for our Paid Article service. and how that dovetails into some of our other "paid" offerings like portal creation. As a result:
    • I created a WikiCoachingLog as a landing page for interaction and discussion between the coaches and community, thinking that could be useful.
    • I added a transcript of the IRC discussion WikiCoaching 15-April-2008 if anyone is interested. It's a rather thick read, but might be illuminating to people to see how we trying to organize this work internally. -- TakKendrick | talk Comment_green.gif 01:12, 16 April 2008 (PDT)
  • Check out the new front page Wiki. ~~ MarkDilley
  • How about a story twist to organizational pages? Check out my revamp of StJude.org's page at StJude.org/Idea. I believe this can add a unique texture and feel to the page for when someone reads it, in an attempt to try and relate to the visitor. Nick Burrus [ Talk - Contribs ]
  • 2008Qtr1StakeholderMeeting TODAY!!!!! --Simon | talk

edit Monday, 14 April 2008

edit Friday, 11 April 2008

  • Green technology enthusiast, Jean Pierre de Lutz, and I collaboratively worked on the AboutUs sponsored page GreenBoatBateauVert.com, to create an informative article about the ongoing Greening of his boat Sean Seamour III - an experience he wishes to share with mariners from around the world who seek to make the sea a greener place. But Jean also wishes to bring the French community closer and wants them to actively participate in this effort. So, he went ahead and translated the entire article we had created into French: BateauVert ! Kudos to Jean for his initiative, great work on the articles, and bringing out the true potential of Coach-Client collaboration. Obed Suhail

edit Thursday 10 April 2008

edit Friday, 04 April 2008

edit WikiBirthday cake!

Last week (25 March) was the 13th anniversary of the creation of the first Wiki by AboutUs' own Ward Cunningham. To commemorate this "WikiBirthday" the Portland WikiWednesday group had a cake at their meeting on 3 April. Members were asked to "edit" the blank cake by adding their names in frosting. (photos by JohnStanton) -- TakKendrick | talk Comment_green.gif 16:39, 4 April 2008 (PDT)


edit Thursday, 03 April 2008

edit Wednesday, 02 April 2008

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