http://blog.mattwynne.net Tea-Driven Development Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:40:49 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en A while back, I asked the Cucumber team for the ability to call in the steps of one scenario from another. The canonical example of this is the 'log in' scenario: Scenario: User logs in Given there is a User whose username is "matt" And I follow "log in" ... http://blog.mattwynne.net/2008/11/14/dry-up-your-cucumber-steps/ Pair programming brings a great many benefits to a team that's truly mastered it. Those of us who are lucky enough to have experienced working on a really effective XP team know about that almost magical thing that starts to happen when the barriers between different members of the team break ... http://blog.mattwynne.net/2008/11/08/total-programming-and-the-xp-team/ A common sloppy mistake I see programmers making is to forget to declare a method as private when it's only being used inside a class. This seems to happen more in Ruby, or maybe it just bothers me more because we don't have interfaces. Rails ActiveRecord validation callbacks are a ... http://blog.mattwynne.net/2008/11/07/your-private-methods-are-none-of-my-business/ I going to be speaking (with my good friend Rob Bowley) at the forthcoming XP Day conference in London, 11th & 12th December 2008. Which means that I am now officially extreme. Dude. Come to my talk if you want to hear my experiences of breaking a team out of the ... http://blog.mattwynne.net/2008/11/05/i-am-extreme/ On finishing a long contract and project at the BBC a few months ago, I was incredibly touched to be given a brand new Asus EEE PC as a leaving gift by my colleagues. Although I loved the tiny form factor and take it with me practically everywhere, I was never ... http://blog.mattwynne.net/2008/10/27/ubuntu-eee-the-os-your-eee-should-have-been-born-with/ Rails comes with some default logging stuff built in, but if you're used to the sophistication of the log4x frameworks, it's pretty basic. One of my requirements is to be able to log exceptions that occur during an ActionController HTTP request, and have the configurable logging mechanism decide what to do ... http://blog.mattwynne.net/2008/10/23/logging-http-error-messages-in-ruby-and-rails/ Last weekend I was at CITCON Europe, a great opportunity to meet some of the leading minds in the agile software movement. One intriguing new term I heard a few times was "value fetish". Let me try to explain what I think it means, and discuss the implications for agile ... http://blog.mattwynne.net/2008/10/08/is-the-value-fetish-killing-agile-teams/ Since moving off Windows as my development platform, git has probably been the greatest treat. A great, lightweight, self-contained and very well thought-out piece of software, it's one of those rare tools that once you've used it for a while, you can't image how you worked without it. A lot of ... http://blog.mattwynne.net/2008/09/13/bring-git-joy-to-windows/ A few months ago I was at the peak of my powers. I was leading a team of ten C# developers building a huge project on Microsoft's .NET platform. I had been working on the Windows platform for years, and there was rarely a question from the team I couldn't answer ... http://blog.mattwynne.net/2008/08/18/scrabbling-up-the-learning-curve/ Some people think there is no conference for those of us who care about CI and testing, but oh yes there is.As an avid reader of this blog, I know that you, like me, realise that continuous integration and testing are to software development what the spirit level and the ... http://blog.mattwynne.net/2008/08/17/come-to-citcon/