Seb’s blog
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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…
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Aslak’s view of BDD, Cucumber and automated testing
This is a quote from Aslak Hellesoy on the Cukes Google group. “Even on this list, the majority of people seem to think that Cucumber == Automated Tests == BDD, which is WRONG. What people need to understand is: Cucumber is a tool for BDD Cucumber is a tool for Specification By Example Specification By…
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The context and definition challenge
We’re very good at rationalising. Almost any statement can be justified by the retroactive application of the twin constraints of “context” and “definition.” As an example, Chris Matts (@papachrismatts) talked about the “death of Agile” in a recent blog post of his, and I took issue with that. We talked about it briefly at a…
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The Beer Belly testing anti-pattern
The ‘Testing Pyramid’ is often trotted out to illustrate a suggested distribution of tests. More small “unit” tests; less deep “end-to-end” tests. And various people have observed common anti-patterns, specifically the Ice Cream Cone, where there are lots of end-2-end tests and hardly any unit tests. The anti-pattern that I see most often is…
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Tax or investment – which do you prefer?
I was working with a client last week who were trying to fit some new technical practices into their daily routine. The way they were trying to ‘account’ for this in their iteration planning was by introducing a 10% ‘tax’ on their velocity. In other words, they were reducing the number of story points that…
Got any book recommendations?