TDD Pro-Tip: TDD-blockers are everywhere for me, even now, after twenty years of practicing it, so I still try new ways to work around them, and I don’t always find them, and I wait for next time. A respondent had a great question, and this is a kind of "sideways" answer. The question: Given that […]
When To Start Doing TDD Read More »
I recently wrote about upstream-centric architectures and how we have to alter our making when we adopt them. A key alteration: change the definition of "deploy" to include "local-runnable". In that long list of problems I encountered in a real upstream-centric app I worked with a few years ago, a great many of the first-round
Upstream Uptime #3: Making Local-Runnable Services The Norm Read More »
We started talking about the new upstream-centric style or architecture the other day. I wanted that to be a first swing at describing the problem, but I didn’t really get there. Let’s do that now. The problems I see in many orgs attempting this approach, service-orientation or microservices, etc., are most visible when we come
Upstream Uptime #2: The Problem In Practice Read More »
Increasingly, we build apps by composition with other apps. Granting that this approach is viable, still it comes with a cluster of related problems, and to really win with this style, we’ll have to address them. An "upstream" is an independent program that my application’s correct behavior depends on at runtime. It is typically 1)
Upstream Uptime #1: Grasping the Problem Read More »
A valuable trick I sometimes forget: first solve the easy customer. Before we continue, I feel we need to pull some real cases in this set of muses about story splitting. It can’t be super-concrete, because a) confidentiality and b) too much detail hides the idea. Hopefully, this will help a little with figuring out
Story-Splitting #3: Easy Customer First Read More »
I’ve described the basic concept of sociotechnicality before. I know it’s an awkward word. We don’t really have an easy word for it, because some very old and successful approaches to the world that didn’t need it. The world, however, has changed. Just about everyone I’ve spoken to has some idea of what "social" is
Sociotechnicality: Odd Word, Odd Concept Read More »
A new coach in the VBCA[*] world asked me what she should be studying. What, she asked, should she be reading, to get good at promulgating change in her large org? [*] – Very Big Corporation of America, see Monty Python. She proposed a bunch of topics, including management, psychology, sociology, a variety of geekery
Coaching Pro-Tip: Read More Narratives Read More »
I use my sorted list of story criteria when I have to back off getting the perfect story. We went into this yesterday here, and for the threading impaired, the blog will be up late tomorrow. There are a bunch of criteria for the perfect story, so many that at times I’m at a loss
Story-Splitting #2: Choosing Which Criterion To Relax Read More »
I sort my criteria for a story, so that when I step back from "perfect story", I step in the right direction. A "perfect" story has several attributes. Each of them contributes to its value in different ways, but maybe before we even list them we have to talk a little about what that value
Story-Splitting #1: Understanding the Criteria Read More »
TDD Pro-Tip: The step-wise technique has to account for what the user experiences when, so I have to build ways to control that when stories get bigger than a day. (A new friend asked the question: when stories get hefty, how do we "live at HEAD" without exposing our users to code that’s still WIP.)
One Story, One Day Read More »
