Rants

The Vanishing Cowboy Coder

Last month I wrote an “Agile Tip of the Month” for the Agile University Newsletter. For those who don’t read the newsletter I thought I’d post it here: The creative genius working long hours churning out code that only he can understand; this is the cowboy coder. How did he get here? How do people …

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Write the Test First

Reflections on the Three Steps of Test First Development

Decide what to do, figure out how to do it and then do it well. These are the three essential steps we perform over and over again in TDD. Each step is different and requires us to focus on different things. Separating out these steps helps us focus on each one at the right time, …

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Specify Behaviors with Tests

How Many Tests Are Enough?

How much code coverage should we have? I say 100%. Do we really need to test getter and setter methods? No and yes. We don’t need to verify the trivial behavior of getters and setters but it can be valuable to have a test for them so that their existence is specified. Likewise, I have …

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Write the Test First

Triangulation

If I get stuck and I don’t know how a complex algorithm should work I’ll write a test for an error case. Then I’ll write a test for the simplest non-error case I can think of and return a hard coded value. Then I’ll write another test case and see if I can figure out …

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Announcements

Agile Software Development Essentials class in Denver a Success!

The Denver ASDE class 12/1-3/09 went really well. In addition to developers, we had a program manager in the class who loved it. She said, “Software managers need this kind of training so they can communicate better with their developers.” Here are a few more comments from students: “Determining when to apply patterns and which ones to …

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