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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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Joel , in his inimitable way, posted the flame bait of all flame bait posts yesterday , explaining the role of the Duct Tape Programmer. To my surprise, the Twitterverse started to reverberate with commentary, but weirdly, almost all of it was very negative about the post, many claiming that Joel was...
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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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After my recent post about our software team moving to Kanban I got an email from Derick Bailey asking how he could help with our transition. Derick graciously offered to meet with our team and help with any questions we may have and provide guidance as someone who has traveled this path before. We met...
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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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Several months ago our software team decided to dive into the Scrum process. What we were doing before that simply wasn't working. The project had unstable delivery dates and we knew something needed to change. Fast forward about four months and we're going to take a shot at using Kanban and...
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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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Recently I had a post where I made the statement ‘To CI or not to CI, did not realize it was still even a question?’ . The intent of the post was to assert that I did not realize that having some sort of CI (Continuous Integration)/Build Server was not considered the norm for a development...
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Over the past few weeks I have been presenting at a few .Net user groups and one of the questions I asked prior to each session was the number of people who have some sort of CI/build server for their team. Now keep in mind I qualified this question by stating that this build server could be a...
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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...