Matt Wynne taking it one tea at a time
I participated in a workshop today run by Willem van den Ende and Rob Westgeest at SPA2009 on acceptance testing. As usual at such conferences, it was great to be able to mingle with other people who take the value of acceptance testing for granted, and be able to concentrate on the issues that are …
Continue reading “The Future of Automated Acceptance Testing”
This session was a marathon 6 hour tutorial introduction to Haskell on a sunny Sunday afternoon. I’d installed the GHC beforehand and tried out a couple of ‘hello world’ style tutorials, but other than that walked in with no experience of Haskell or any other functional programming. Here are my notes: Basic Syntax make up …
I’ve written before about my views on the importance of pair programming as a way of building a common conciousness in a team. When two people work on a piece of code together, not only is it instantly reviewed for correctness and readability, but already two people on the team understand exactly why the code …
Continue reading “If Code is Written Solo in a Forest, Does it Make a Sound?”
My employer, Songkick.com are hiring for developers. To join this team you must be, or believe you are capable of being, someone who creates beautiful software. Nothing less. If you think that sounds like you, do yourself a favour: stop working for those idiots who keep making you rush out all that half-arsed crap and …
A few weeks ago I bumped into Chris Matts and thanked him for the ‘Real Options’ session he’d lead at SPA last year. I promised write up this little story about what I took out of it. When I got back from the conference, my team were at a point where we had to chose …
At work, we have been practising something approximating Acceptance Test Driven Development now for several months. This means that pretty much every feature of the system that a user would expect to be there, has an automated test to ensure that it really is. It has given me a whole new perspective on the value …
I just got around to watching Avi Bryant’s talk on MagLev, a new Ruby VM built on top of GemStone’s Smalltalk VM. http://www.vimeo.com/1147409 Presumably this is the kind of thing Smalltalkers have been able to do for decades, but to me the prospect of having this kind of freedom on a Ruby platform is very …
Continue reading “MagLev: Death of the Relational Database?”
This evening I facilitated our first coding dojo at work. I’d spent some time over the holidays putting together a progression of Cucumber acceptance test cases to build up the solution, and had solved the problem once myself. I used the minesweeper kata from http://codingdojo.org/ which was a really nice easy problem for our first …
At XP Day 2008 I proposed an open-space session on pair programming. Specifically, I wanted to explore the reasons why programmers might not want to pair, or find it such an unpleasant experience that they’re put off doing it again. Judging by the great number of people who turned up and stayed for the session, …
I’m just back from this year’s XP Day, London. Thanks to everyone who came and packed out the room to hear Rob and I talking about our experiences evolving our team from Scrum to Kanban. The slides are here. There’s also a great transcript of the talk here on Tom Hume’s blog. Thanks Tom!