Steve Freeman

From a note I just wrote to a mailing list:

I could do with some co-location. These days, much of the interesting stuff is happening in small specialised events that are scattered around the calendar and around the world. I, my family, and my body clock (and the troposphere) can’t hack it any more.

I’ve been looking [...]

Nat Pryce just wrote this sidebar for our book

Incremental and Iterative Development

In a project organised as a set of nested feedback loops, development is incremental and iterative.

Incremental Development builds a system feature by feature, not module by module. Each feature is implemented as an end-to-end “slice” through all [...]

The program for Agile 2008 is out and there’s more than enough to do.
Keith Braithwaite and I have been “producing” a track called Committing to Quality which we’re very pleased with. And I have a couple of sessions of my own…

For reasons too complicated to explain, I’ve ended up with a copy of University Politics which includes a full reprint of F. M. Cornford’s satire on organisations Microcosmographia Academica, continuously in print since 1908. Of course, now the 15 page pamphlet comes with a 100 page scholarly introduction.

Anyway, it’s all still true and those [...]

TDD is Keyhole surgery for software

Whilst writing up an extended example of TDD, I was trying to be as incremental as possible, adding tiny little slices of behaviour all the way through the system: replace one component, get that working; show a connection established, get that working; show one field on the UI, get that [...]

Robert X. Cringley has another entertaining rant about whatever turned up this week. Two quotations:

First, while ranting about the IT research consultancies.

There are themes at Gartner and its competitors — ideas that are presented on an almost seasonal basis like adding fins to change a 1956 Chrysler New Yorker into a 1957 Chrysler New Yorker. [...]

Wait for a minute in.

This requires a lot of practice.

via http://centripetalnotion.com/

“Keyboads dirtier than a toilet” (BBC)

It justifies my view that eating lunch at the desk is uncivilised, and that pairing stations should have two keyboards.

Now that everything is USB, maybe we should just carry our own input devices and just plug in when wherever we’re working. Hmmm. Sounds like my dissertation, maybe I should have [...]

I seem to be blog-stalking Keith again.

In his post on Creation under Constraints he uses a post from Andrew Binstock to write about the benefits of discipline on creativity. After all, is there anything more constrained than the form of a Rock’n’Roll song? Bartok had a thing about using the Golden Ratio to structure [...]

There’s been quite a buzz in the narrow world that I inhabit about this recent interview with Donald Knuth. For us “TDDers”, the relevant quote is:

[…] the idea of immediate compilation and “unit tests” appeals to me only rarely, when I’m feeling my way in a totally unknown environment and need feedback about what works [...]