TDD Pro-Tip: TDD depends heavily on a view that accepts and even values iteration. TDD is an I&I style of work: iteration and increment are both involved. Nearly everyone gets "increment": an increment is an improvement, an enhancement, a detectable step forward in value. Each increment is a pass over the code, during which we […]
TDD Pro-Tip: Iterations Aren’t Increments Read More »
TDD Pro-Tip: The first step past beginner-TDD lies in grasping the difference between awkward and graceful collaborations, and learning the myriad contextualized patterns for moving from the former to the latter. Folks invest a little in TDD, maybe cuz they’re excited, maybe cuz they’re ordered. They read a little. They try an exercise or two.
TDD Pro-Tip: Graceful and Awkward Read More »
Folks worry a lot about building the wrong thing, that is, making software that does not please the many and different interests of the org, the users, the operators. I’ve certainly seen that. We all have. Government seems particularly consistent at doing it, tho surely there are plenty of commercial orgs that have the same
Building the Wrong Thing Read More »
TDD Pro-Tip: Build cells — logic nucleus on the inside, environment inputs & outputs on the outside, and a semi-permeable cell wall between the two. The metaphor i’m proposing here is really about the nature of borders in code. Prior to TDD, my grasp of this topic was driven largely by the great theory of
TDD Pro-Tip: Build Cells Read More »
Okay, twice now i’ve intro’d this question about the value of m-proof, the rather trivial proof microtests give: what the geek said is what the computer heard is what the geek wanted. Time to just deal with it, eh? Remember that all of the value that comes from microtests comes before we’re done with the
The Gold Of Microtests: The Value Read More »
I made the claim that m-proof, the seemingly valueless dust that microtests give us, is actually gold. Not only that, but it’s gold whose working out clearly connects to the triple focus of our movement: the made, the making, and the maker. Microtests prove that what the geek said is what the computer heard is
The Gold Of Microtests: Another? Intro Read More »
Okay, shall we take a breather from difficult concepts and do something at least a little more concrete and geeky? And the windswept trees whisper "yessssss, yessssss". Recall that a microtest is a tiny snippet of test code, run in a separate app, that depends on a tiny snippet of shipping code. It is typically
The Gold Of Microtests: The Intro Read More »
My five TDD premises stuff has been well-received over the months since I put it out, but one of them seems still very underplayed, even by many died-in-the-wool TDD’ers: the correlation premise. The correlation premise says that the internal quality of our code correlates directly with our productivity. When the internal quality goes up, productivity
The Correlation Premise: Redux Read More »
TDD Pro-Tip: Prevent complex test data from spiraling out of control by going to builder & custom comparator early on. The push-to-small, coupled with SOLID, coupled with things like third normal form, all lead us to a place of wanting to compose domain objects into potentially very rich dependency graphs. A card in a address-tracking
TDD Pro-Tip: Start Builders & Partial Comparators Early Read More »
TDD Pro-Tip: "No, smaller." In TDD, almost without exception, we want everything: a test, a method, a class, a step, a file, really, almost everything, to be as small as it can be and still add value to what we’re doing. This is the most common gaping hole in the practice of the noob, and
TDD Pro-Tip: ‘No, Smaller. Read More »
