It’s been down for a few months, but we’re back again. Hooray! I mostly blog over at Cucumber nowadays, with the occasional dabble with Medium and quite a bit of Twittering.
Author Archives: Matt
Sandi Metz’s Practial Object Oriented Design comes to London!
I’m delighted to announce that I’ll be joining Sandi Metz to teach two [courses on Object-Oriented design](http://kickstartacademy.io/courses/practical-object-oriented-design) this summer in London.
Bring your Product Owner to BDD Kickstart for free!
BDD is powerful stuff, and it’s much more powerful when your product owner understands the benefits. We love having product owners at BDD Kickstart. The first day is all about the collaborative aspects of BDD where we learn how to break down and describe requirements using examples. We find that product owners really enjoy it. …
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Costs and benefits of test automation
I think balance is important. Whenever I teach people about BDD or automated testing, we make a list of the costs and benefits of test automation. The lists typically look something like this: Benefits: thorough analysis of a requirement confidence to refactor quick feedback about defects repeatable test living / trustworthy documentation frees up manual …
Cucumber-Ruby 2.0 moves into master branch
After months of hard work, we’ve got Cucumber 2.0 into a state where it can run its own tests and (usually) give us useful feedback. We’ve just merged this code into the master branch. There’s still a lot to do. The specs all pass, but only approximately 50 / 150 scenarios are passing. The 100 …
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Are Ruby conferences taking us in the wrong direction?
I just got back from Baruco. I had a wonderful time, made new friends and caught up with some old ones. but I was still left with a concern. That’s what this post is about. The whole event felt very professional and well-run. Many of the speakers were people who I recognised or knew from …
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What is BDD and why should I care? (Video)
This is the pitch that I give right at the beginning of my BDD Kickstart classes to give everyone an overview of what BDD is, and why I think it matters. In this video, I cover: How BDD improves communication between developers and stakeholders Why examples are so important in BDD How BDD builds upon …
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Half-arsed agile
Transitioning to agile is hard. I don’t think enough people are honest about this. The other week I went to see a team at a company. This team are incredibly typical of the teams I go to see at the moment. They’d adopted the basic agile practices from a ScrumMaster course, and then coasted along …
How much do you refactor?
Refactoring is probably the main benefit of doing TDD. Without refactoring, your codebase degrades, accumulates technical debt, and eventually has to be thrown away and rewritten. But how much refactoring is enough? How do you know when to stop and get back to adding new features? (image credit: Nat Pryce) I get asked this question …
Death to sleeps!
When I run workshops to review and improve people’s automated tests, a common problem I see is the use of sleeps. I have a simple rule about sleeps: I might use them to diagnose a race condition, but I never check them into source control. This blog post will look at what it means to …