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...
View ArticleOptimising 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...
View ArticleA 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...
View ArticleTwo 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...
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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...
View ArticleHalf-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...
View ArticleWhat 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...
View ArticleCosts 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:...
View ArticleBring your Product Owner to BDD Kickstart for free!
BDD is powerful stuff, and it’s much more powerful when your product owner understands the benefits. We love having product owners at BDD Kickstart. The first day is all about the collaborative aspects...
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Sandi Metz’s Practial Object Oriented Design comes to London!
I’m delighted to announce that I’ll be joining Sandi Metz to teach two courses on Object-Oriented design this summer in London. We’re nick-naming it POODL. You have two options: A two-day class running...
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