Seb’s blog
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Always Be Coding
Last night I finally got around to watching Erik Meijer’s keynote from last year’s Reaktor conference. It was called “One Hacker Way” and, while it contains much that is apocryphal – or at least wildly inaccurate – it scores over the older, more pedestrian type of keynote in two important ways: first it is highly contentious,…
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Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
From http://kids.niehs.nih.gov/explore/reduce/: Three great ways YOU can eliminate waste and protect your environment! Waste, and how we choose to handle it, affects our world’s environment—that’s YOUR environment. The environment is everything around you including the air, water, land, plants, and man-made things. And since by now you probably know that you need a healthy environment for…
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Do you practice BDSA?
I get to visit a lot of teams. I talk to my peers about their experiences too. For every agile success story there seem to be a load of less happy outcomes. There are three common ways that I’ve seen agile ‘adoption’ go wrong, and they are: Bondage – “You can never change the business. That’s…
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Half a glass
Is this glass half empty or half full? There’s normally more than one way to interpret a situation, but we often forget that the situation itself may be under our control. I often find my clients have backed themselves into a corner by accepting an overly restrictive understanding of what they’re trying to achieve. They will tell…
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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…
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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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To TDD or not to TDD? That is not the question.
Over the past few days a TDD debate has been raging (again) in the blog-o-sphere and on Twitter. A lot of big names have been making bold statements and setting out arguments, of both the carefully constructed and the rhetorically inflammatory variety. I’m not going to revisit those arguments – go read the relevant posts,…
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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,…
Got any book recommendations?