Articles

I’ve just come back from the excellent NDC 2012 event in Oslo, where they published my article about opportunity cost in The Developer magazine ahead of the conference.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.