Agile

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.

Charles Simonyi introduced himself at a recent workshop with the words: “I was at Xerox PARC in the 70s, Microsoft in the 80s, and working on intentional software in the 90s”. He wasn’t showing off, he was just there. He pioneered WYSIWYG, created Microsoft Word, Excel and Access (as a data visualization tool), championed OO and invented metaprogramming.

What this tells me is that when Charles Simonyi thinks he is on to something, it’s probably worth listening. (Ok, I’ll forgive him szHungarian notation.) For the last 15 years, Charles has been on to intentional programming.