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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Nat Pryce and I will at XpDay Benelux be presenting our workshop on Sustainable Test Driven Development. It explores the fact that we have to live with our tests once we’ve written them, so we’d better make them meaningful.

Between us we’ve run this at the last London XpDay and Agile 2007 with good responses.

Brian’s blog entry on A thought on mocking filesystems shows that he understands the point.

One of the potential risks with mock-based testing is of simply reproducing the implementation of the Code Under Test, but that only really gets in the way if you can’t change the collaborators you’re mocking. The point of the exercise is […]

Joe Walnes has written up the idea that jMock constraints should be used in jUnit assertions. It reads better and is more flexible.

I’m glad he’s written up such a nice explanation because some of us have felt for ages that this infrastructure belongs in jUnit, rather than in jMock, but it isn’t going to happen.

Happily […]

Following Brian Marick, we’ve been introducing Rick Mugridge’s new Fit Library on our project. It’s a great improvement, easier to read and easier to code (no more static fields to pass data between fixtures).

Like Brian, we’ve been debating over whether to repeat lines or use tables. I think in the end we have to fall […]

Another data point, Tony Rizzo quotes an example of why “a system is defined not by its components but by the interaction of its components”

At ADC2004 I was chatting with Ward Cunningham about the origins of Test Driven Development. He said that, for him, it came from working with a group that was working in parallel on the same code base. The domain was mathematical and so pretty straightforward to test, so he pushed the testing forward to make […]