Seb’s blog
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Unit tests are your specification
Recently a Schalk Cronjé forwarded me a tweet from Joshua Lewis about some unit tests he’d written. . @ysb33r I’m interested in your opinion on how expressive these tests are as documentation https://t.co/YpB1A3snUV /@DeveloperUG — Joshua Lewis (@joshilewis) December 3, 2015 I took a quick look and thought I may as well turn my comments…
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Huge scale deployments
Deploying to 10 or 20 servers can be complicated. But what are some of the tools, tips and patterns for successfully deploying to 1,000s of servers around the world? Last month I participated in an online panel on the subject of Huge Scale Deployments, as part of Continuous Discussions (#c9d9), a series of community panels about…
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Flatulent agile
Recipes I’ve been working with a number of larger, older organisations recently and it has really brought home to me the difference between the promise of a nimble, responsive teams and the reality of a sluggish, bureaucratic behemoth. Then, looking back over years of writings, posts, promises and dreams I see frequent repetitions of the phrase…
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Is the customer always right?
Today I’m in London for the first day of SPA 2015. I was early to the venue and I went to the registration desk to sign in. “What’s your name?” asked the receptionist. “Seb Rose” I replied. “No. You’re not registered” she said. After a few minutes of spelling out my name, and searching around…
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Branching and Continuous Delivery video discussion
Following on from my previous post and discussions online, we arranged a Google Hangout to discuss things in more detail. I was joined by Dave Farley, Lars Kruse, Olve Maudal and Mike Long and you can watch the unedited video here: I don’t think we reached any agreement and after the video ended Olve suggested…
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BCS: Agile Foundations
Preconceptions challenged I really wanted to dislike this book, and in some respects I managed to achieve my goal. This is a book published to support yet another spurious agile certification (YASAC?), and I really don’t like that. The authors continuously use ‘Agile’ as a capital-A, noun, rather than the lower-case-a adjective that it clearly ought…
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Continuous delivery conversations
Last week I was at the CoDeOSL conference in Oslo. It was an interesting day, with some very good sessions, but as usual it was conversations had in the breaks that were of the most interest. I’d like to describe two discussions that I had that seem, on the face of it, to be in conflict.…
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Making a meal of architectural alignment and the test-induced-design-damage fallacy
Starter A few days ago Simon Brown posted a thoughtful piece called “Package by component and architecturally-aligned testing.” The first part of the post discusses the tensions between the common packaging approaches package-by-layer and package-by-feature. His conclusion, that neither is the right answer, is supported by a quote from Jason Gorman (that expresses the essence…
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Entanglement (or there’s nothing new under the sun)
I’ve just read The Age of Entanglement : When Quantum Physics was Reborn by Louisa Gilder. It’s a tremendous book, looking at the interplay between great physicists over the whole of the 20th century. If you want to learn about quantum physics itself, this is probably not the book for you, but if a mix…
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Rolling Rocks Downhill
It’s almost a year since I posted a glowing review of “The Phoenix Project” – a business novel, following in the footsteps of Goldratt’s “The Goal”, about continuous delivery. If you haven’t yet read it, then I’m going to recommend that you hold fire, and read “Rolling Rocks Downhill” by Clarke Ching instead. I should…
Got any book recommendations?