articles

Better Best Practices

March 23, 2008

articles, best-practices, infoq, learning, oredev, talks

Last October I was privileged to give a keynote talk at the Øredev conference in Malmö, Sweden. It was a late substitution. The original speaker, testing guru James Bach, had to cancel at the last minute for personal reasons. I felt pretty intimidated stepping into his shoes, especially since the other keynote presenters were Joel Spolsky and Andy Hunt, but I figured since no-one had heard of me I’d probably slip under the radar.

James was planning to talk about best practices, and it seems we have similar opinions about them. I would encourage you to read his wonderful blog article where he rigourously deconstructs the phrase¹, and then just as eloquently picks apart the arguments of anyone who disagrees. So I thought I would do something around the same topic.

I wrote it up as an article and the kind folks at InfoQ published it, and the Øredev team has put up a video of the talk. (For some reason I can’t get it to work in firefox on ubuntu, but I’m pretty sure the guy on the left is me).

1. I didn’t realise until long after Øredev that he was the author of that article. It made me very happy when I found out.

SOA for the rest of us

September 2, 2007

agile, architecture, articles, programming, services, soa, software

13 Comments

Earlier this year I wrote an article to introduce service-oriented architecture to non-technical people. It was published in the May 2007 issue of Better Software magazine.

The kind folks at Better Software have allowed me to provide a PDF version of the article, complete with retro 1950s graphics. You can also read it as a single html page.

Please post any comments here, because I’ve disabled comments on the page itself.

Behaviour-driven stories

February 12, 2007

agile, articles, bdd, programming, summary

9 Comments

At a recent software architecture workshop, I was discussing the ideas behind BDD with a great group of people (more about that soon). One theme that kept coming up was the fact that I needed to write much more about BDD as an entire methodology, and to address the current perception that it is just a repackaging of test-driven development (which, to be fair, is where it started).

As I was describing the workings of BDD, I discovered that I had made the assumption that everyone knew what a Story was, in the agile sense of defining a requirement. It turns out that there’s a whole world outside of my little bubble that use all sorts of different processes for identifying and defining requirements, and in particular they don’t know what I mean by a Story, nor why they should care.

I was specifically asked what a story was from a behaviour-driven perspective, so I have written it up in an article called What’s in a Story?.

In the interests of releasing early and often, I will be editing and updating it in response to comments on this post. I’m particularly interested in people’s thoughts about how BDD stories compare to Use Cases. I’ve read a bit about use cases and used them a long time ago, but I haven’t been around them recently enough to really remember whether I liked them.

Article: Introducing Behaviour-Driven Development

October 20, 2006

agile, analysis, articles, bdd, programming, software, summary, tdd, testing

5 Comments

At the beginning of this year I wrote a feature article for Better Software magazine, which was published as “Behavior Modification” back in March.

The article is now available on my site. It gives an overview of behaviour-driven development, from its origins as a coaching aid for TDD through to its current form as a proven, comprehensive development approach.

BDD article published in Better Software magazine

March 19, 2006

agile, articles, bdd, sqe, writing

2 Comments

So, it’s taken me two years to finally get round to writing down what behaviour-driven development is all about, but I’m pleased with the result. The article has just been published in the March edition of Better Software as “Behavior ((I didn’t quite get away with the UK spelling)) Modification”.

I started talking about BDD as an evolution of TDD at the back end of 2003, and played with the idea of a BDD framework, in the form of JBehave, during 2004. I made some noise about it at the Agile Developers’ Conference in June 2004, and then at the end of the year everything went kind of quiet. That’ll teach me to have a day job.

At the end of last year, I finally got back into BDD evangelist mode, and decided to write the story of behaviour-driven development: where it came from, what it’s about, how it has grown and where it is going. Just when I was busy working out what I wanted to say, by a curious coincidence, Brian Marick approached me to write an article about BDD and JBehave for his excellent magazine, Better Software, which I was targeting as my ideal audience anyway. Hurrah!

You know what to do – rush to the StickyMinds.com site and take out a subscription so you can read the article and tell all your friends about it.

I have to thank Brian and his excellent editorial team, as well as the ThoughtWorkers who gently (!) shepherded me through the process of writing and editing the article. In particular, Liz Keogh, Martin Fowler (yes, that one), Joe Walnes and Rebecca Parsons were extremely helpful and supportive. Thanks guys.

—DanNorth.net

embracing uncertainty

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