Think About Edge Cases
Continuing my series of posts based on Seven Strategies for Writing Better Stories from my book, Beyond Legacy Code: Nine Practices to Extend the Life (and Value) of Your Software, here is the next strategy. Although stories are composed of three elements that include WHAT the feature is, WHO the feature is for, and WHY the …
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Read MoreStart Simple then Enhance
Continuing my series of posts based on Seven Strategies for Writing Better Stories from my book, Beyond Legacy Code: Nine Practices to Extend the Life (and Value) of Your Software, here is the next strategy. Another great aspect of using stories to drive Agile software development is that we can start with simple stories that create …
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Read MoreKnow Why a Feature is Wanted
Continuing my series of posts based on Seven Strategies for Writing Better Stories from my book, Beyond Legacy Code: Nine Practices to Extend the Life (and Value) of Your Software, here is the next strategy. One of the most powerful and important aspects of user stories is the WHY clause. WHY a feature is wanted is …
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Read MorePersonify the Who of Stories
Continuing my series of posts based on Seven Strategies for Writing Better Stories from my book, Beyond Legacy Code: Nine Practices to Extend the Life (and Value) of Your Software, here is the next strategy. When developers know WHO a feature is for and can identify with that user then they can often build a better …
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Read MoreFocus Stories on the What
Continuing my series of posts based on Seven Strategies for Writing Better Stories from my book, Beyond Legacy Code: Nine Practices to Extend the Life (and Value) of Your Software, here is the next strategy. Focus Stories on the What The most important aspect of a user story is contained in the WHAT clause because …
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Read MoreSee Stories as Placeholders
Last year, I finished a series of 72 blog posts that expanded on the first set of “Seven Strategies…” for each practice in my book Beyond Legacy Code: Nine Practices to Extend the Life (and Value) of Your Software. I included two sets of “Seven Strategies…” in my book and I think it’s time to …
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Read MoreGreen Tests and Red Tests
In practice I found that there are times that I want a bit more test coverage than I get from just doing test-first development. When I do test-first development, I always write a failing test first and then I create the implementation to make that failing test pass. As a result, I get by default …
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Read MoreRadiators and Silos
In the old days of corporate America, the way you got ahead was through hard work and perseverance. You strove to become an expert in some area that was valuable so the people would come to you for your expertise. This is how you got ahead. This is how you got into management. You got …
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Read MoreMakers and Menders
I’ve been getting back into some research interests of mine that require data acquisition from a variety of sensors so naturally, I’ve gravitated towards using the Raspberry Pi. If you’re unfamiliar with the Raspberry Pi, is a full-blown computer on a card about the size of a cigarette pack and offers a graphical user interface, …
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Read MoreCore Developer Practices
Every field of engineering has a core set of practices that they follow and software engineering is no different. But what are they? The answer seems to depend upon who you ask. There is no overall consensus in our field about what the right standards and practices should be. We have many languages, many frameworks, …
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Read MoreSO what?
When I asked professional software developers in companies what software development and design principles, they follow I oftentimes get a blank stare. Our industry has not matured enough to be able to extract out the major principles of constructing software the way civil engineering has been able to extract out the major principles of constructing …
Read MoreStill XP After All These Years
Are you humming in your head Paul Simon’s “Still Crazy After All These Years”? I am. And it does seem crazy. Crazy that some ideas that came out over 20 years ago in the fast-paced software industry are still relevant and valuable today. But they are. Kent, Ron, Ward, and many others who were early …
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Read MoreHow I Use User Stories
When I write user stories, in addition to the story itself, I like to help define edge cases in my stories and I typically do this as acceptance tests. There are automated acceptance test tools such as FIT and Cucumber that not only allow me to define acceptance tests but also help me run them …
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Read MoreUser Stories Support Object-Oriented Development
The number one worst practice I see consistently in object-oriented software development is writing procedural code. Even object-oriented programming projects contain code that is highly procedural. You’ve probably seen code like this yourself where it’s basically a series of steps that prescriptively describe a process that is then wrapped within a class. This is really …
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Read MoreHow Small should a Story Be?
Stories should be as small as possible while still providing some value to the user. Usually, we strive to create the smallest increment of value possible but this is sometimes not as straightforward as it may seem. Sometimes we write stories with the intention to build upon them later or combine pieces of common stories …
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Read MorePolymorphism
Polymorphism is a big word for an important technique in object-oriented programming to help make code extendable. Rather than expressing business rules as conditional statements in code, we move them into factories and use them to instantiate objects that do the actions we want to take. We need to know different things when we create …
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Read MorePair Programing Paradoxes
Of all the software developer practices I teach, the one I get the most resistance from managers is pair programming. They tell me they have too much work for their team to do and if they paired then their developers’ throughput would be cut in half. There is a naïve assumption in that statement. The …
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Read MoreDrive to Testability
There are patterns, things that developers do when writing code that support testability of code and there are anti-patterns, which are things that developers do that lead to writing code that is difficult to test. As a developer, I’ve found it helpful to become aware of some of these testability patterns and anti-patterns that I …
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Read MoreThe Importance of Continuous Integration
Perhaps the most important yet easiest to implement of all the software development practices in Agile is continuous integration. Continuous integration is simply creating an infrastructure where the code that is being built can immediately be integrated into a project. One of the biggest challenges when writing software is the dependency relationship between the code …
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Read MoreThe Importance of Technical Practices (Again)
Software development has undergone many revolutions over the last few decades. The way we build software today is fundamentally different than the way we did just a few years ago. Our industry is maturing and we are beginning to pay attention to the quality of our work. No longer is just fulfilling the specification enough …
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Read MoreSummary of Seven Strategies Series
I finished my “Seven Strategies” series of 72 blog posts with seven strategies for implementing each of the nine practices from my book, Beyond Legacy Code: Nine Practices to Extend the Life (and Value) of Your Software. These posts are filled with practical advice for implementing the nine core practices from Scrum, Extreme Programming, and …
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Read MoreRefactor to Learn What Not to Do
One of the things that I was not expecting when I started refactoring other people’s code was that I started to see improvements in the way I wrote my own code. I didn’t make those same mistakes. Refactoring other people’s code has taught me a great deal about things to do and things not to …
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