Shifting certainties. This is where i’m headed these days. Without belaboring criticism, what i’m seeing is that we have a trade with a whole stack of roles and humans to fill them, and, of necessity, they have assembled a varied, sometimes compatible sometimes not, set of certainties by which they navigate. The trouble is that, […]
Shifting Certainties Read More »
Refactoring in testless code is hard. It’s the perfect demonstration of the manglish "agency" of code. It is simply not possible to change testless code and guarantee you’ve done no damage. It’s one of the most delicate operations geeks do. There are principles, yes. There are tricksy techniques, too. But mostly, there is experience &
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These wrangles over system seem mis-focused. Moreover, they seem part of the surface of the elephant i’ve been trying to describe. A system is inherently an abstraction. It compresses, filters, selects, features from an experienced reality. We formulate systems for at least 3 reasons. First, so we can establish commonality. That is, we can use
How I Don’t Apply XP, or Scrum, or Anything Read More »
My intent in writing a test is to satisfy myself by the cheapest means possible that the code does exactly what I think it does. I stress that this is my intent. Believe me, fifteen minutes on the internet will reveal to you a barrage of other possible intents. Surely, by now, it will be
Why I Write A Test Read More »
Dear smart geeks: stop worrying so much about whether you’re gonna get it wrong, you definitely are gonna get it wrong. How do I approach this? Hmmmm. Okay, I see a couple of threads that need to be pulled together. This one’s gonna be clunky, I fear. Ahhh well. I’m definitely gonna get it wrong,
You’re Gonna Be Wrong Read More »
Think about your last huge unrequited crush. A real one, I m talking. A crush so big you go to sleep thinking of your future together, and wake up, ummm, guilty. The kind of crush that great romantic stories are made from, and for. The wobbly-knee d kind. And a complete non-starter: when I say
Your Design Is Broken: It’s TDD, not TDYAR Read More »
A microtest has the following properties: It is short, typically under a dozen lines of code. It is *always* automated. It does not test the object inside the running app, but instead in a purpose-built testing application. It invokes only a tiny portion of the code, most usually a single branch of a single function.
One Page Intro To Microtests | Video Read More »
I’ve been mulling over what I do as a coach, for lo these many years, actually, and I feel like sharing some of it. I coach: I create or exploit openings through which individuals, including sometimes myself, can step closer to who they wish they were. I came to coaching early on in the movement.
When I think about teams, I think about them with a strange mixture of metaphors. First I see a thing that is in some respects like one of our classic pictures of an atom. There’s some particles in the middle, and some others that seem somewhat clearly "outside" like the electrons in their clouds. But
The Team And Three Flows Read More »
Friend Matt asked me to elaborate on "the noobification of everything" in the geek trades. This is a floppy vague one as yet, so be prepared to play fast and loose. The so-far endless demand for new software has created a poor skills distribution curve into the trade. Divide ever-so-arbitrarily our ranks into 5, dreyfus-style
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