TDD Pro-Tip: I spend considerable effort making it possible not only to implement a test I want, but to make that test easy to read, to write, to run, and to debug. I’ve talked a lot about five premises of TDD. The money premise, the steering premise, and the chaining premise all get involved when […]
Refactor Your Tests Read More »
Change Pro-Tip: When I can give people an experience, I get dramatically better results than when I give them reasoning. I’mo tell you one of my stories. Twenty years ago, with a considerable amount of "Shut up, I’m the pro from Dover", I got permission to do TDD in a corner of the app I
Create Experiences Not Arguments Read More »
Coaching Pro-Tip: Thicken yourself. Do that by pursuing the backstory of any idea whatsoever that has nothing to do with your trade. That’s it. No thread.
Refactoring Pro-Tip: As soon as I move beyond small-scope refactorings, I ask whether my change would be easiest side-by-side or in situ. Before we even start this conversation, remember remember remember: easiest nearest owwie first, and keep repeating it. This conversation happens after we’ve found everything we can do in a scope of one or
Refactoring: Side-by-Side v. In Situ Read More »
Yesterday, we talked about Alice’s City On The Hill and her approach to getting there. I offered, instead of the Alice approach, an approach that was Human, Taken, Local, and Iterative. Today, let’s consider this business of Procedural -> Human. Every system for making software is a mixed system, with three kinds of thing in
From Procedural to Human Read More »
Change Pro-Tip: It’s common, but mistaken, to believe that some change I want to make will be procedural, given, sweeping, and final. Let’s imagine someone, we’ll call her Alice. Alice is a mid-level manager, a department head let’s say, neither quite at the top nor quite at the bottom. She’s got some power, but not
Alice’s Approach To Change Read More »
Change Pro-Tip: We can’t (purposefully) change what we don’t sense, what we don’t talk about, or what we assume can’t be changed. I remind myself of this one a lot, because it’s easy to forget in the middle of the circus that passes for professional software development. Changing things means going from A to B
What We Can’t Change Read More »
Changing Pro-Tip: When I remember to line up the"betters", so my "better" is their "better" is his or her "better", my changes go a lot better. A refresher, my definition of coaching is "Creating or exploiting openings through which individuals, including sometimes myself, can step closer to who they wish they were." This is all
Change Pro-Tip: Lining Up The Betters Read More »
Change Pro-Tip: All the knobs a little, all the knobs a little, over and over again, is how I’ve make my most successful changes, in code and organizations alike. A while back, I mused first about "Always Small, Always Improve" and I later elaborated "Always Small, Always Better, Always Wrong". Lo these two decades ago,
Change Pro-Tip: All The Knobs A Little, All The Knobs A Little Read More »
Geekery Pro-Tip: I frequently remind myself: Think Less, Sense More. It’s advice I give to me all over the place, from the most technical parts of the sociotechnical fractal to the most social parts of it. It’s an odd thing to say, so we better dig in to it a little. I’ve recently come from
Geekery Pro-Tip: Think Less, Sense More Read More »
