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.
Tag Archives: TDD
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 …
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 …
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, …
Continue reading “Optimising a slow build? You’re solving the wrong problem”
TDD vs BDD
I regularly find myself explaining to people the difference between TDD (Test-Driven Development) and BDD (Behaviour-Driven Development). There still seems to be a lot of confusion over this, so I wanted to write this up for reference. Late last year I was interviewed for a virtual panel on InfoQ along with Dan, Gojko, and Liz. …
Skillsmatter BDD Exchange
Last week I travelled down to London to the BDD Exchange conference. It was a one-day conference organised by Gojko Adzic and I had a great time. I missed Gojko’s talk as I travelled down from my cave in Scotland on the day, but I did arrive in time to see Chris Matt’s excellent lecture …
BDD Training
Update: This training is now available as a public course, starting October 8th in London. Would you like to learn how Behaviour-Driven Development can help your company get better at software development? I’ve helped several teams learn BDD, and I’ve started to formalise the training I’ve been doing into a set of course modules. The …