Category: Practices
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Recycling tests in TDD
The standard way that TDD is described is as Red-Green-Refactor: Red: write a failing test Green: get it to pass as quickly as possible Refactor: improve the design, using the tests as a safety net Repeat TL;DR; I’ve found that step 1) might be better expressed as: Red: write a failing test, or make an…
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User Story Mapping
I’ve been reading Jeff Patton’s work online for years, learning from his ideas and approaches. You’ve probably come across his Mona Lisa analogy for iterative and incremental development – and if you haven’t this is a good time to go and read it 😉 Well, he has just released a book, User Story Mapping, and…
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Using SpecFlow on Mono from the command line
SpecFlow is the open source port of Cucumber for folk developing under .NET. It has been compatible with Mono (the open source, cross platform implementation of the .NET framework) for several years, but most of the documentation talks about using it from within the MonoDevelop IDE. I wanted to offer SpecFlow as one of the…
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The most important change you can make to help your team succeed
How busy are you? Are you close to a deadline? Is the team feeling pressure? Every team I visit seems to be under the same heavy workload, and consequently has a lot of improvements to the process, the environment, the technology that they can’t quite get to yet. They know they need to get to them,…
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5 rules of continuous delivery
Inspired by Sandi Metz’s BaRuCo 2013 presentation “Rules” (which you should watch if you haven’t yet) I started thinking about whether there were some rules that might be useful in the continuous delivery domain to “screen for cooperative types”. I came up with these as a starting point: Check in everything – we’re used to…
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Continuous delivery – the novel
I find myself recommending the same books over and over again. When speaking to techies I invariably recommend GOOS; when speaking to managers The Mythical Man Month or Waltzing With Bears. Over the past year or two, I’ve also pointed a lot of organisations at Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and Dave Farley. It’s an…
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Teaching TDD (TTDD)
There has been a flurry of discussion about how to teach TDD, sparked off by a recent post from Justin Searls. In it he lists a number of failures that range from “Encouraging costly Extract refactors” to “Making a mess with mocks” all of which distract attention from the concept that “TDD’s primary benefit is…
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Eat your own dogma food
The software development community experiences fad after fad. Consultants and thought leaders dream up new methodologies; old practices are relabelled and promoted as the next big thing; flame wars are fought over names, tabs and brace position. One of the few practices that has stood the test of time is that of “eating your own…
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TDD at interviews
Allan Kelly posted an article on DZone this week predicting that TDD would be a required skill for developers by 2022. Vishal Biyani asked on Twitter about how one might test TDD skills, and I promised to blog about my experience of using Cyber-Dojo in interview situations. Cyber-Dojo is a browser-based dojo environment developed by…
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When is a tester not a tester?
No, I’m not trawling through my xmas cracker jokes. I was looking through the programme for DevWeek 2014 and both my sessions are tagged as “Test”. This is following a pattern started at ScanDev last year and followed by several other conferences at home and abroad. Why am I bothered? It’s not that I mind…