Steve Freeman

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

Yesterday, during the XpDay Sampler track at QCon, Keith Braithwaite presented the latest version of his talk on measuring the characteristics of Test-Driven code. Very briefly, many natural phenomena follow a power law distribution (read the slides for more explanation), in spoken language this is usually known as Zipf’s Law. Keith found that tracking the […]

Dave Nicolette has a nice post called Good-enough today beats complete next year about
how Agile helps to focus development on delivering something valuable in time for the business, instead of waiting for the full, perfect solution.
I think it’s important also to distinguish different kinds of quality. The clue is in the phrase “well-graded dirt road”, […]

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a little while and now I feel triggered by Keith Braithwaite’s especially grumpy contribution.

I’ve had a few discussions around the “Has Agile Lost Its Mojo” session, including with Keith. One person called me an elitist, which is an interesting term of disapproval around an investment bank. Clarke […]

I’m back from Citcon. So a few more notes

Things people have shown

crap4j
Buildix The new CruiseControl UI looks much better

The worst build I ever worked saw…
We had a hallway discussion about some of the difficult build environments we’ve worked on over the years. A bad build can be really unpleasant to work […]

Hi. My name is Steve and I’m (sniff), I’m a Keyboard Hog.

But there may be a solution. I was talking to fellow sufferer Ivan on the train back from SPA and I thought about my, in NLP terms, kinesthetic tendency1. I realised that the important thing for me was to have something in my hands […]

Vidar Kongsli is talking about Towards Agile Security in Web Applications. They’ve done a nice job of integrating the two, which is interesting as the culture of security people tends to be more static.

During planning, they introduced “Misuse Stories”, like user stories but for potential expoits of the system. Once they have Misuse Stories, […]

Shameless promotion…

I’ll be running our tutorial on using FIT as a communication tool at OOPLSA this year. Tomorrow is the last day for early discounts, so now’s a good time to sign up.

We had some pretty good responses when we ran it at Agile2006. One of our ex-colleagues said several people from his client […]