Category Archives: software
On craftsmanship
Well, I certainly didn’t expect that kind of interest in my last post. In the past I’ve tended to have a few hundred people reading my infrequent mumblings. In the last few days nearly 20,000 people have popped by according to my site statistics, leaving nearly 150 comments. Crikey! The overriding message I got was […]
Programming is not a craft
TL;DR Software Craftsmanship risks putting the software at the centre rather than the benefit the software is supposed to deliver, mostly because we are romantics with big egos. Programming is about automating work like crunching data, processing and presenting information, or controlling and automating machines. Non-programmers don’t care about the aesthetics of software in the […]
Introducing Deliberate Discovery
Last year I wrote about how we are doing planning all wrong, or rather, how we seem to focus on the wrong things when we do planning. We obsess about stories and story points and estimation, because that’s what we’ve been taught to do. It reminds me of the story about a man who comes […]
The perils of estimation
Business people want estimates. They want to know how much it’s going to cost them to get a solution, and they want to know how likely it is to come in on time and on budget. And of course quality is not negotiable. Agile teams I encounter are at best nervous about estimates and at […]
One day DDD track at SkillsMatter
There’s a one day domain-driven design event happening at SkillsMatter this Friday, 19 June in London. I’m not speaking this time so I get to sit back and enjoy some talented folks talking about really applying DDD rather than just theoretical stuff. Eric Evans will be kicking things off at 10am then there are five […]
RSpec book in beta
It’s finally happening – I’m writing a book! Well ok, the remarkable David Chelimsky is writing a book. It’s called Behaviour Driven Development with RSpec, Cucumber and Friends and myself and a few other folks are contributing in varying degrees. The book is already in beta, which means you can buy the PDF now from […]
The End of Endotesting?
…or why Mockito is my new friend. So what’s endotesting? The pioneers of the technique we now know as mocking presented a paper at the XP 2000 conference, where they first introduced the idea to a wider audience. They prefaced it with the quote: bq. “Once,” said the Mock Turtle at last, with a deep […]
JBehave 2.0 is live!
Some ancient history Back in 2003 I started work on a framework called JBehave. It was an experiment to see what JUnit might have looked like if it had been designed from the ground up for TDD rather than as a unit testing framework. I was also starting to use the phrase “behaviour-driven development” to […]
SOA for the rest of us
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 […]
Introducing rbehave
rbehave is a framework for defining and executing application requirements. Using the vocabulary of behaviour-driven development, you define a feature in terms of a Story with Scenarios that describe how the feature behaves. Using a minimum of syntax (a few “quotes” mostly), this becomes an executable and self-describing requirements document. BDD has been around in […]
