TDD Pro-Tip: RORA (Run Once, Run Away) is insidious, and although I am an old-guard agilist, I still have to actively resist its charms every day. Alright, well, look, I figured out after some helpful application of 2×4’s to the head, that I needed to phrase these pro-tips as advice to me, even when, as […]
Run Once, Run Away (RORA) Even Bites Pros Read More »
TDD Pro-Tip: An important steerability force for me is in my strategies for sidestepping the pyramid problem. There are a lot of ways we could describe this "pyramid problem". Perhaps the most straightforward way is to ask how much code is "in play" during a test. At some point, and it varies by codebase, the
Steering Around The Pyramid Problem Read More »
Because TDD’ing little toy problems is so easy, I try to turn my big real-world problems into collections of them. Yeah, it’s the steering premise rearing it’s ugly head again, though maybe from a different angle than we’ve undertaken before. (The short premises video is here) A lot of folks claim that TDD is just
TDD Pro-Tip: Make Hard Problems Collections Of Toy Problems Read More »
If your change works, and if it’s small enough to take at one gulp, Then you might consider de-emphasizing the argument for adoption, and focusing your powers on gaining an experiment. (If you change doesn’t work, or it’s too big to take at one gulp, then you might want to go back to the drawing
Change Pro-Tip: Experiments, Cheating, and Responsibility Read More »
In Kotlin, functions whose last argument is a lambda, i call them end-lambda’s, make natural expressions of tree-shaped data builders. Say you’re building Performances, where a Performance includes (possibly) the list of songs being performed. making shit up here, it might look like: performance { song { } song { } } First thing you
Using Kotlin for Data Builders Read More »
You can’t be a great geek w/o being a great human. I get how the tradition says you can. I get how much you wish it were so. You can’t be a great geek w/o being a great human. Being a great human is fabulously hard. It’s the hardest thing humans have ever conceived of.
Great Geeks Are Great Humans Read More »
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: I give the same advice to myself as a coach that I do to my teams: "Try Different, Not Harder". A while back we covered Alice’s vision of how to change things. In countering it, I offered the adjustment "from final to iterative". The idea of iterative change is straightforward: It means that
Try Different, Not Harder Read More »
The road to hell is lined with convenient parking spaces. I said recently that we need fewer addresses and more routes. These slugs are attempts to get at what I think keeps going wrong for us — in the trade, possibly in entire culture. There are numerous systems for software development out there competing in
A Question Of Humbling Proportion 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 »
