Steve Freeman

I’ve just finished an excellent little book on the Leo, the first business computer in the world. What does it teach us? That we’ve have known the right way to get things built since the earliest days of the computer, because after all it’s about people not hardware, but precious few organisations seem to be able to do this. That customers who want cheap, effective solutions have to have internal staff who know what they’re doing, otherwise they’ll spend a lot of money on some Magic Solution. Something to remember in these days of oursourcing.

At XPDay London, Tim Mackinnon and Joe Walnes presented a tutorial on using Mock Objects to drive top-down design. With Nat Pryce and me, they make up a Gang of Four who’ve been reworking our thinking about Test Driven Development with Mock Objects.

Martin Fowler was there giving a keynote and came to the tutorial. We’ve […]

Ward has announced that he’s joined Microsoft. Given the number of Agile luminaries they’ve acquired, I’d like to see some early progress from Microsoft in making their products appropriate for Agile Development.

I’ve been converting my soon-to-be-ex (1) team to the XP approach to comments (i.e. don’t, fix the code instead). We had a problem that really had to have a line of comment to explain it (some hackery to stop Visual Studio complaining). Peter Clary noticed that when there are very few comments, the ones you […]