Category: Uncategorized

  • Diamond recycling (and painting yourself into a corner)

    Diamond recycling (and painting yourself into a corner)

    The post I wrote recently on recycling tests in TDD got quite a few responses. I’m going to take this opportunity to respond to some of the points that got raised. Do we really need to use the term “recycling”? The TDD cycle as popularly taught includes the instruction to “write a failing test”. The point…

  • Value by association

    Value by association

    Do you care what label is on your shirt? Or your car? Or your laptop? I bet you do, but why? Is there something substantive underneath the fashion-victim facade or is it just some sort of post-modern tribalism? A few of us have been debating the death (or otherwise) of agile, and it seems to…

  • Chris Matts – an open letter

    Chris Matts – an open letter

    Welcome to another post in my “Death of agile” series. This post is an open letter to Chris Matts, the ‘father’ of Real Options and Feature Injection and co-parent of BDD. See also: Death of agile Open letter to Dan North Open letter to Gabriel Steinhardt Dear Chris, I recently came across one of your…

  • Introducing 2nd party

    It’s always a good idea to wrap any component that we don’t own behind an interface that we do own. There are a number of benefits: 1) We can tailor/narrow the interface to expose only the behaviour that we need 2) When we choose to change the external component, we’ll only have to modify the…

  • Rejecting CDD

    One of the 12 agile principles is: “Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.” Indefinitely. Wow, that’s a long time!* How will we ever know if we’ve delivered on this principle? Well, we won’t. We’ll only know when we fail to deliver – when team…

  • Be pure. Be vigilant. Behave.

    There has been a bit of traffic on the Growing Object Oriented Software (GOOS) mailing list recently about how many tests you should write, and what sort they should be. Understandably it got back to the perennial discussion about what constitutes a unit test, what an integration test, what an acceptance test. And where does…

  • Simpler. Clearer. Faster.

    The UK Government has invested £17 million over the past 2 years migrating from several rather old websites to the new, shiny gov.uk website. James Stewart and Anna Shipman gave an uplifting talk at the Edinburgh BCS branch meeting on May 1st, describing how they had scaled from one small team of 12 to ten…

  • On alcoholism, chainsaws and deliberate practice

    I’ve been running a lot of training courses recently and I’ve noticed that once people have chosen where they’re going to sit, they return to that position every day. We are creatures of habit, and some habits seem to form very quickly. If I rearrange the room before the second day, or ask people to…

  • Living documentation can be readable and fast

    In an earlier blog I promised to describe how we could exercise thin slices of our application stack, while still expressing our scenarios in a business-readable, end-to-end style. I talked about this at Cuke Up! last week and published an article covering it in the ACCU journal Overload. For completeness, I’m now adding this as…

  • Edinburgh BDD Kickstart

    At the beginning of March Matt Wynne and I ran another very enjoyable 3-day BDD Kickstart course in Edinburgh. The course was hosted in the Edinburgh Training and Conference Centre in the heart of the old town which, despite its historical location, is a thoroughly modern venue. There’s a lot to cover in the three…