Test It Where It’s Easy A basic mantra: don’t test things where they’re hard to test. A very basic application of this mantra comes up for almost every noob TDD’er: "How do I test this complex private method?" The answer is simple: make it not private somewhere else and test it there instead. If your […]
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The Problems with Enterprise Standards I’ve been thinking lately of how much "enterprise standards" ruin our lives. When I coach in VBCA environments, I confront this problem more or less constantly. The standards can be enterprise tools, enterprise negotiations, enterprise processes. I see two factors in this. 1) solution-locking definitions, and 2) inadequate coaching reach
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It happens that there are sometimes very complex changes you want to make to your code. These might involve changes to dozens of existing classes, and to the heirs of some of those, too. How do we approach this kind of situation? Recall that managing mental scope is the very heart of programming well. But
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Alright, pre-coding design. By that, I mean, the serious thinking one does before one starts typing code into the computer. The first puzzle of pre-coding design is to identify when to start & went to stop. Start When You Have A Story When to start: when a story has been selected for implementation. That starting
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Information and Behavior The most common difficulty confronting young coaches may be their oversimple grasp of the relationship between information & behavior. In this oversimple version, behavior derives primarily from the information possessed by the behaver. It’s quite alluring then to treat info as a surrogate for behavior. That leads to thinking every situation can
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