17 Jan 2010
Brian’s been paying us the compliment of taking our book seriously and working through our extended example, translating it to Ruby.
He has a point of contention in that he’s doubtful about the value of our end-to-end tests. To be more precise, he’s doubtful about the value of our automated end-to-end tests, a view shared [...]
Agile Programming, Book, Test-Driven
- 6 Comments
13 Oct 2009
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 [...]
Agile Programming, Software culture
- 6 Comments
7 Sep 2009
This popped up on a technical discussion site recently. The original question was how to write tests for code that invokes a method on particular values in a list. The problem was that the tests were messy, and the author was looking for a cleaner alternative. Here’s the example test, it asserts that the even-positioned [...]
Agile Programming, Coding, Test-Driven
- 0 Comments
8 Mar 2009
At the recent Software Craftsmanship conference in London, Willem and Marc ran a session on Responsibility-Driven Development with Mocks for about 30 people. Nat Pryce and I were sitting at the back watching and occasionally heckling.
The first striking thing was that when Willem and Marc asked who was using “Mock Objects” most everyone put [...]
Agile Programming, Coding, Test-Driven
- 2 Comments
22 Feb 2009
In very bad taste, but very funny: “Hitler’s Nightly build fails”.
and we should remember that Stalin won…
Agile Programming, Software culture
- 4 Comments
17 Feb 2009
So, Jurgen Appelo is unhappy that some of the more experienced Agile names have been telling him what to do. In particular, apparently they’ve been doing so without understanding complexity theory; he’s not reacting well.
In between the ranting, much of what Jurgen says is obviously true. For disorganised teams, adopting Scrum and nothing else will [...]
Agile Programming, Organisations, Software culture
- 2 Comments
14 Feb 2009
Dave West has written a cautionary posting (Lean and Agile: Marriage Made in Heaven or Oxymoron?) on the dangers of taking a simplistic view of Lean and Agile. He’s right that a naive reading of a Lean approach to software will just trap us in another metaphor, manufacturing, that’s as inappropriate (or appropriate) as we [...]
Agile Programming, Software culture
- 8 Comments
18 Aug 2008
Here’s another post on the lines of: “Hammers considered harmful. Every time I use one, it strips the threads from my screws.” One of the clues is in the list of symptoms at the end of the first paragraph: “mammoth test set-ups”. The tests were complaining but not being heard.
In truth, we’ve done [...]
Agile Programming, Test-Driven
- 4 Comments
15 Jun 2008
It’s been a busy week. Michael Feathers has an interesting post on the nature of Test-Driven Development, to which Keith has responded. I think Michael overstated my position on “most” people (it was probably a bar discussion) but over the years I’ve seen a lot of TDD code that doesn’t look right. Incidentally, Tim Mackinnon, [...]
Agile Programming, Test-Driven
- 16 Comments
28 May 2008
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 [...]
Agile Programming, Software culture
- 1 Comments