Steve Freeman

Prove you’re not superstitious! I’ll be giving my talk on Sustainable TDD at Skills Matter on Friday, 13th November. Sign up here (if you dare).

This talk is about the qualities we look for in test code that keep the development “habitable.” We want to make sure the tests pull their weight by making them [...]

I’m running a track at QCon in San Francisco on Friday 20th November. The topic is Technical Skills for Agile Development, and it’s about some of the technical essentials that Agile teams need to keep moving.

I’ll be presenting a session, based on material from our book, on how to live with your tests over [...]

This “Darwinian” post that TDD Is Not For the Weak says that not everyone can cope with TDD, it’s for “the Alpha, the strong, the experienced”. I don’t want to believe this, because I think that developers who can’t cope with any level of TDD shouldn’t be coding at all, so I won’t.

This claim [...]

A Liberal is a Conservative Who Hasn’t Been Mugged

I discover that our book Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests is already up with the file sharers. This is before Nat and I have even seen a printed copy. I don’t know whether to be flattered that someone thinks our effort is worth pinching or annoyed [...]

In this post, Tobias Mayer argues against doing Extreme Programming (XP). I have a lot of time for Tobias, but I think he’s wrong on this one. I don’t know who he’s been talking to, but some of this is “strawman” argument, and I’d be more likely to be convinced if Tobias had tried XP [...]

About a month ago, Michael Feathers wrote another post that cited Gordon Ramsey. That reminded me to follow up my earlier post with observations from a couple of episodes from UK series 4 that make the point (thanks Channel 4).
First up is a curry restaurant in Nottingham (which has no shortage of competition) opened by [...]