Steve Freeman

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

In very bad taste, but very funny: “Hitler’s Nightly build fails”.

and we should remember that Stalin won…

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]