One of the main reasons I was drawn to adopt Ruby as my primary development language last year was the RSpec story runner, a fledgeling project to bring developers and users closer together with executable specifications that are easy for both humans and machines to read. I was really attracted to the community around these …
Author Archives: Matt
Advantages of Limiting your WIP
As a coach, I like to introduce new practices only when I can offer them as a solution to a problem that the team has identified for themselves. On my current team we’ve been tracking our Work in Progress (WIP) for some time, but we’ve never taken the step of systematically limiting it. At a …
XpDay London 2009 Announced
XtC are pleased to announce the 9th consecutive London XpDay: The Agile community has grown and matured over the years we’ve been running XpDay, so now we want an event that helps practitioners collectively advance the State of the Art. The first day will consist of programmed sessions, the second day will be an Open …
Testing your Code’s Usability
We all like usable software, but what about usable code? How do we test the usability of the code we write? One way is to get another programmer to work with it. If a bug is discovered in some code you’ve recently written, instead of just quickly fixing it yourself, see how easy it is …
CITCON North America
CITON (Continuous Integration and Testing Conference) Europe was one of my favourite conferences last year: A chance to hang out with some very thoughtful and experienced people in a close-knit setting. CITCON US has just announced the venue and dates. The conference is amazing value – free! – but the 150 places go fast, so …
The Agile Alliance Functional Testing Tools Workshop
Organised and facilitated by Elizabeth Hendrickson this was a great group of people to meet with. Elizabeth ran the day as an open-space, a format which I really enjoy, and which worked very well for such an interesting, intelligent and enthused bunch of people. I came away from the day having had the chance to …
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7 Reasons Why Pair Programming Makes Sense
Did I mention that I like pair programming? Here are some reasons why it’s good for you and your boss. More Trucks The higher the truck number of your team, the more resilient it is to losing people. Pair programming spreads knowledge of the code around the whole team meaning each team member has a …
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Pain-free and fun password-less SSH with ssh-forever
A while ago I wrote a tip that showed you how to copy your public SSH key to a remote server to allow you to login without entering a password every time. I’ve since put this into a script that I use, and today I got sick enough of copying that script onto yet another …
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Personas for Debugging Pair Programming Session
As I may have mentioned I’m running a session at Agile 2009 called ‘Debugging Pair Programming’. There’s a preview of the session tomorrow night at Skills Matter and I’ve just finished preparing for it. Mind if I run a couple of things past you?
Debug Pair Programming with Me in London
I’ll be running a preview of my Agile 2009 workshop ‘Debugging Pair Programming’ at Skills Matter on Monday 10th August. If you’re on a team that’s using or trying to adopt pair programming, this is a great chance to explore and understand some of the complex reasons why this is such a difficult skill to …