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.
Category Archives: Agile / Lean Software Development
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 …
Two ways to react
Every organisation that makes software, makes mistakes. Sometimes, despite everybody’s best efforts, you end up releasing a bug into production. Customers are confused and angry; stakeholders are panicking. Despite the pressure, you knuckle down and fix the bug. Now it gets interesting: you have to deploy your fix to production. Depending on how your organisation …
A coding dojo story
It was 2008, and I was at the CITCON conference in Amsterdam. I’d only started going to conferences that year, and was feeling as intimidated as I was inspired by the depth of experience in the people I was meeting. It seemed like everyone at CITCON had written a book, their own mocking framework, or …
Optimising a slow build? You’re solving the wrong problem
At the time I left Songkick, it took 1.5 hours to run all the cukes and rspec ‘unit’ tests on the big ball of Rails. We were already parallelising over a few in-house VMs at the time to make this manageable, but it still took 20 minutes or so to get feedback. After I left, …
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Building software backwards
I am utterly dismayed by the number of so-called Agile teams I meet who are still, after all this time, building software backwards. What do I mean by that? Let’s defer to the great W. Edwards Deming as he ridiculed the approach of 1970s American manufacturing to quality: Let’s make toast the American way! I’ll …
Interview on QCon: BDD, Cucumber and Hexagonal Architectures
I was interviewed recently by QCon’s Peter Bell about various subjects dear to my heart: BDD, Cucumber, Relish and hexagonal architectures. Click here to watch the video
Thinking outside the shu box
I just got back from the fantastic Lean Agile Scotland conference, where I spoke about why agile fails. I’ve been doing a lot of travelling this year since The Cucumber Book came out, consulting and training different companies in BDD. A pattern I keep seeing are companies who adopted agile a few years ago but …