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On March 31, 1998, around 10am, my then-manager Alex and I left the office we shared together and headed over to Electronics Boutique. Alex and I were both developers working for the IT department of an up and coming software company called PC DOCS. In those days, we didn’t have a corporate firewall...
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I’m currently reading Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles . As the title suggests, it deals with certain fundamental differences in the way we see the world and how that affects our political views. Don’t worry, I’m not going to delve into politics in the...
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I am 99% sure I have had a post like this in the past, but my google-foo was weak today and I could not find it. Do not let anyone blow smoke up your back side, testing is expensive, testing takes time but most importantly testing can help improve the quality of your code. If you are going to spend...
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The blogosphere has gone a bit crazy the last few days with posts responding to Joel Spolsky’s latest article about "The Duct Tape Programmer" . Bloggers everywhere are tossing their two cents in and saying what parts of Joel's post was good and what wasn't good. Once noticeable trend...
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Things I’ve said in a session before: “Friends don’t let friends ORM” “ORM is a pattern, not a framework” “I like typed datasets, and I cannot lie” It’s not that I’m anti-ORM, or believe popular ones like NHibernate, Linq2Sql, and EF are useless...
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If you find yourself using reflection in your unit test to push 'stub’ data into it your test just may smell. Now there are times (especially when dealing with legacy code) that you need use reflection to crack open a class to push/pull values but I would strongly suggest you consider the solutions...
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Today I was asked what I thought about asking each of our feature teams to report the total number of new unit tests created during their iteration. My knee-jerk reaction was to ask the person WTF were they thinking. However, my better sense (yea, I have a little common sense) kicked in....
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Working with people is a lot like working with code. New relationships are green fields. Over time they become brown fields and (just like code) they require maintenance. I’m sure that everyone reading this can identify some legacy relationships that they would describer as, well, complicated. Just like...
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I yearn to be consistent. I want my professional values to be the same as my personal ones. This is why I was quick to sign the Agile Manifesto ; it aligned with my personal values. I have been overcommitted for the last couple of months and the stress has forced me to do some professional reevaluation...
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Today I had a conversation with our ‘scrum of scrum’ masters (we have 7 different scrum teams on our product team of 60+) and he asked me why someone would provide ‘developer tests’ as a task for the backlog? Before I go any further, this is NOT a bait type of email, simply my opinion. If you do...
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The other day on Twitter there was a stream whether it is better to completely scrap an applications code base and start over, or refactor from within. Now I do want to state right now: The information here is based on my experiences and is simply my opinion. I know this is almost on par...
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I often identify myself as an Agilist. When I first began to use the term, I was met with a great deal of trepidation. I remember the first few times I attended the local user group. “Oh, you’re one of those guys”. This hesitation has diminished considerably, but I still find that there are some interesting...
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Part of my job at work is to teach and mentor other developers on our team. Right now I am in the process of teaching two of our developers how to create unit tests (notice I did NOT say integration tests because most anyone can do those). We are also learning how to create our tests by utilizing an...
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In my last post ( here ) I was giving a wrap up of the Mocking session I recently did at TriNug . In that post I gave some of the reasons (sorry, I meant excuses) people gave for not doing any type of automated testing during their dally development ritual (notice I am staying away from TDD at this point...
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I'm giving a talk on TDD at our local UG tonight, and under the influence of some recent posts here on devlicio.us, I just finished reworking my presentation. This post is an outline for the first half of my presentation. The Problems Code has entropy. That is over time it deteriorates. At least...