Muses

Your Design Is Broken: It’s TDD, not TDYAR

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 unrequited, I m being clinical in an effort to minimize the likelihood of breaking out into laughter, as doctors and nurses in every ER around […]

Your Design Is Broken: It’s TDD, not TDYAR See Full Post

What’s Coaching?

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. I was already a teacher and tended to be a leader in teams. I glommed onto XP immediately, and just as immediately started promulgating it

What’s Coaching? See Full Post

The Team And Three Flows

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 that metaphor slips a little. In atoms, the electrons & protons & neutrons are separate and separated. In teams, it’s more like a swarm. So

The Team And Three Flows See Full Post

The Noobification Of Everything

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 or thereabouts. 1’s know where to put semi-colons. 5’s know as much as we all know about geekery. We have way too many 1’s for

The Noobification Of Everything See Full Post

Strange Borders (And Bitching)

Thinking this morning about strange borders, led there by a typically weird geepaw route. If u didn’t know, coaches sit around all the time and bitch about their clients. This is perfectly ordinary and maps onto all jobs I think. Such behavior is "good thing, but". It’s important to do and it’s risky as hell. Bitching about clients brings a mixed lot of positive benefit and negative ill. Co-bitching is bonding, for instance. A way for us share, a kind

Strange Borders (And Bitching) See Full Post

RORA – Runs Once, Run Away

Today’s muse, another damned geepawism: RORA technique. RORA means "Runs Once, Run Away". It is the standard technique in a great many software dev environments. A developer is tasked with some story. She codes it using a variety of half-assed techniques, including mostly GAK testing. More geepawism: GAK means "geek at keyboard" testing. You know the GAK drill: run the code. Look at the output. Fire up the debugger. Look at the output. Bless it. Ship it. RORA includes not

RORA – Runs Once, Run Away See Full Post

How’m’I Gonna Test This?

I often say "how am I gonna test this?" but — language being what it is — my meaning in asking that is not likely graspable by a noob. To get at what i’m really wondering when I ask this, I may have to take a few asides & detours. First. Why am I writing a test at all? What is the test doing for me? This touches a mantra you’ll hear me mutter over and over. "i don’t work

How’m’I Gonna Test This? See Full Post

On Pairing

A friend asks what to do about a bad pair. That’s a juicy one, and prods me to muse. Why do we pair? It’s one of the techniques we adopt to increase productivity. That’s measured in geekery by insights per hour, or such like. Maybe if we understand what makes good pairing, we can get closer to some possible remedies for bad pairing? Good pairing involves a bunch of otherwise disconnected-seeming aspects. These form an interactive context in which the

On Pairing See Full Post

Five Underplayed Premises of TDD

This entry is part [part not set] of 9 in the series Underplayed Premises

UPDATE: This post has been restructured and made into a video, you can view it here. Here are five underplayed premises of TDD. Why "underplayed"? Well, they’re there. Hardcore TDD’ers model them all the time. But it feels like they just don’t get the camera time. I want TDD coaches and teachers to step back from "what’s an assert" and rigid rule systems, and highlight these premises in their own work. The money premise: we are in this for the

Five Underplayed Premises of TDD See Full Post

Crabby Note To TDD Journeyfolk

TDD journeyfolk, let me rattle your cage a little this fine afternoon. Lemme sketch a common situation for me. I have a problem, not a small one, to be solved in a tech stack I’m not intimately familiar with. Further, some aspects of the problem are things no one on stack overflow has ever done before. They look, on paper, like they might be doable, but there’s no drop-in and very little advice. I’m in this situation where I have

Crabby Note To TDD Journeyfolk See Full Post

Scroll to Top