http://www.m3p.co.uk Working software daily Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:24:35 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there—lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again, and that is well; but also she will never ... http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2010/03/10/mark-twain-again/ I don’t normally do this sort of thing, but this took my colleague Tony Lawrence and me a while to figure out and we didn’t find a good explanation on the web. This will be a very dull posting unless you need to fix this particular problem. Sorry about that. We ... http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2010/02/11/calling-an-oracle-stored-procedure-with-a-table-parameter-with-springs-storedprocedure-class/ 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 ... http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2010/01/17/responding-to-brian-marick/ There are still a few places left for the London XpDay, an event designed by practitioners for practitioners. We’re trying the half-Open Space format again, with a day of prepared sessions (some promising experience reports this year) leading to a day of ad-hoc sessions. This means we can have a conference ... http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2009/11/30/london-xpday-7th-8th-december/ Prove you’re not superstitious! I’ll be giving my talk on Sustainable TDD at Skills Matter on Friday, 13th November. Sign up here (if you dare). This talk is about the qualities we look for in test code that keep the development “habitable.” We want to make sure the tests pull ... http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2009/10/30/friday-13th-talking-at-skills-matter/ I’m running a track at QCon in San Francisco on Friday 20th November. The topic is Technical Skills for Agile Development, and it’s about some of the technical essentials that Agile teams need to keep moving. I’ll be presenting a session, based on material from our book, on how to ... http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2009/10/30/qcon-san-francisco/ This “Darwinian” post that TDD Is Not For the Weak says that not everyone can cope with TDD, it’s for “the Alpha, the strong, the experienced”. I don’t want to believe this, because I think that developers who can’t cope with any level of TDD shouldn’t be coding at all, ... http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2009/10/21/tdd-is-not-elite/ A Liberal is a Conservative Who Hasn’t Been Mugged I discover that our book Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests is already up with the file sharers. This is before Nat and I have even seen a printed copy. I don’t know whether to be flattered that someone thinks our effort ... http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2009/10/14/a-mugged-liberal/ 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 ... http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2009/10/13/do-do-xp/ About a month ago, Michael Feathers wrote another post that cited Gordon Ramsey. That reminded me to follow up my earlier post with observations from a couple of episodes from UK series 4 that make the point (thanks Channel 4). First up is a curry restaurant in Nottingham (which has no ... http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2009/10/04/software-nightmares-2/ 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, ... http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2009/09/07/keep-tests-concrete/ I’ve just upgraded WordPress in response to this security alert. I should have done it ages ago. The alert says Update your WordPress blog before you continue reading this post. That’s how critical this issue is. so it seemed like a good idea to bring the site down until I had time ... http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2009/09/07/apologies-for-the-downtime/ I’ve been mostly off-line for a couple of months: no blogs (reading or writing), no twitter, no open source (sorry, users), very little chat. That’s because Nat and I have been finishing up the copy editing of our book. We’re very much looking forward to it being done. With that ... http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2009/08/06/coming-up-for-air/ Two “facts” heard on the radio today: there are now more mobile phones than people in the UK half of UK children have had no fresh fruit or vegetables in the previous week http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2009/06/10/the-uk-today/ This post has been stewing for a little while, and now I’ve been kicked into writing it up by Naresh Jain’s post on Lessons Learnt from Restaurant Business. Since Channel 4 in the UK started supporting the Mac for their online replays, I got hooked on Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen ... http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2009/06/09/software-nightmares/