Category Archives: agile
TDD: Back to Hand Rolled Stubs
I’m unashamedly an Agile practitioner and self-proclaimed enthusiast. It’s not a perfect way to build software, but I haven’t found anything better. And until I do, this is the approach I’m taking. Building Quality In One of the core principles of Agile is the focus of building quality in from the start, not asserting quality…
Software Development is Like…
Software development is complex and difficult and unlike most other professions that I know of. This makes it tough to explain to colleagues in other parts of the organization, clients, and (all too often) management. We’ll typically try to find something well understood to use as a basis for comparison. Something to help explain the…
Avoiding the Temptation of Record and Playback Acceptance Tests
I’m sold hook, line and sinker on the value of automated testing. Unit tests, integration tests, acceptance tests – I love em all. I joined a new company a few months back (more on that in a later post) and I’ve had the opportunity to get back into some acceptance testing using Selenium/WebDriver. The allure…
Test Driven Development and Positive Reinforcement
I love writing code using test driven development. But this will not be a post about how to test drive your code. There are plenty of very good articles available and, of course, the Kent Beck book. I will reference the obligatory Wikipedia definition, though. Test-driven development (TDD) is a software development process that relies…
“Common” Sense?
I’m sitting around, waiting for my hellfire chili to finish cooking and I came across this gem written by Ron Jeffries. If you’re involved in any way with software development, this is a phenomenal read. His second paragraph starts off with this: Most of us were taught to write down all our requirements at the…
Flexibility and Configuration
I’ve run into numerous folks from both the business and technical sides of the world who want flexibility built into software. Developers and managers alike spew out statements like “We want to leave our options open”, “We’ll need to support that one day”, or my favorite “The business doesn’t know what they want”. As developers,…