Steve Freeman

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 […]

Joseph Pelrine and I are involved in (or is that “committed to”?) starting up a Narrative Inquiry project with the Agile Alliance under their Agile Narratives programme. This one will be done jointly with Cognitive Edge using the Cynefin approach, here’s their announcement.

I’ve started a Yahoo Group for people who are interested.

What is […]

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 […]

http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/01/20/verity_stob_short_curly/

In another brilliant article for the New Yorker, Atul Gawande writes about how Peter Pronovost, a doctor at John Hopkins Hospital, has been proving the value of the humble checklist in situations which are “now too complex for clinicians to carry them out reliably from memory alone.”

Eliminating bugs (both kinds)
The example Pronovost started with […]

I know this is the right way to teach, it’s just taking me quite a while to get there.Stockhausen later said: “In many respects Messiaen did the opposite of what I wanted. He never tried to convince me. That made him a good teacher. He did not give instruction in composition, but showed me how […]

Just bumped into this paper via Kathy van Stone on the TDD listhttp://www.cebase.org/www/frames.html?/www/researchActivities/defectReduction/top10/index.htmlThe summary (in garish yellow and red) is: Finding and fixing a software problem after delivery is often 100 times more expensive than finding and fixing it during the requirements and design phase. About 40-50% of the effort on current software projects is spent on […]

Here’s a great example from Robert Cringley of why crisp requirements aren’t. At least not in almost any system that’s likely to be useful. I think it’s worth quoting the relevant part at length, there’s some other stuff about Google and mobile phones in the original article. Hands up everyone who’s worked on a system […]

As you discovered when you were the project, your nerd’s focus can be deliciously overwhelming, but it will stop. Once a nerd believe he fully knows how a system works, the challenge to understand ceases to exist and he moves on in search of The Next High.

While I don’t know who you are or why […]