- Spike and a New Workflow The other day I found myself writing a single test case the whole day without making a significant progress in the production code. It wasn't efficient at all and I wasted the whole day on stupid test cases - so it was time to ditch TDD for the rest of the weekend and try something different.
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- A Real Man Dares to Delete Code I have seen a lot during the last couple of years, but I have never seen a single developer who deleted working code. Writers are known to delete complete chapters, artists to start from scratch all over again, but for unknown reasons, developers just don't delete their code and start over.
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- A Step by Step BDD Demonstration with Some Useful Insights According to Stephen Covey, the seventh habit of highly effective people is sharpening the saw. If you have ever been to an agile workshop or conference, you may have already heard this expression. Software craftsmen sharpen their saw at coding dojos where they talk to each other a talk about new things or do Kata exercises together.
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- Speaking at ITREND 2011 I was invited to a local conference called ITREND 2011, where I talked about how to use customer diversity analysis, Kanban and eXtreme Programming in order to have less unexpected business changes in one's organisation. I was really looking forward to this event because of two reasons: first, it was held in my hometown Miskolc, Hungary at the University where I studied and work, and second, I finally saw a chance to tell students about recent software development methods, because I knew that this topic wasn't covered in their curriculum.
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- Saving the Continuous Integration I really like continuous integration, that's why I'm always sad when I see one dying. Unfortunately, I've seen it happen a lot, and in every case its lifeline looked like this.
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- Building a Bridge a.k.a Parallel Changes Several days ago, we had a coding dojo at Digital Natives.
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- Code Review During Retrospective Most of the retrospectives I've kept or participated in were about agile approaches (for example communication with the Product Owner) and organisation-related changes, but not everybody is into these. Most software engineers and craftsmen aren't that interested in how to deliver faster, or how to communicate better, they are interested in how to be better at their profession: programming.
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- Reducing Waste in Testing - The Problem Testing is the most important part of any kind of software development methodology, but it is also the most neglected one. Nowadays, when an organisation does testing, it produces such a high amount of waste that the whole development process becomes very expensive, which makes it harder to win projects over the competition and risks the existing relationship with the customer.
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- How to Narrow Down What to Test An old friend told me that they did not do automatic testing at her company, or any kind of testing for that matter, because in terms of money they are better off if they do ad hoc testing and bug fixing one week prior to the delivery date. Then I got into an interesting discussion where the topic was that the customer does not pay for tests, she pays for a working software.
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- Weekly - CW15 While I spent most of my time with learning more about Ruby on Rails and RSpec this week, I found the following links worth sharing. So here is my collection for calendar week 15, 2011.
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- Pair Programming in Retrospect I've been doing pair programming for two years now. During this period I gained a lot of experience, so it is time to do a little retrospective and organize these experiences. I hope that you find something useful here, or even better, you may start to do pair programming.
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- The Calm Period We are about six weeks after pimping my team - let's see what has happened since then. A massive change is usually followed by a calm period. During such a period the team adapts to the effects of the change (new environment and methodology) and only small additional changes are applied, something like fine tuning.
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- Pimp my Team ## AbstractFrom the middle of January 2011, our organization has been working in a new structure. There were different outcomes of this change, one of them was that my former firefighting team has been dismissed, and so has the team introduced in my Kanban Nightmares article.
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- XP with Kanban instead of Scrum ## AbstractI'm going to step into a minefield, because in this post, I'm going to share my subjective experiences with Scrum, and I'm going to share the reasons why moved from Scrum to XP + Kanban. I'm using the minefield metaphor, because every single sentence I'm going to share can be exploded with good explanations, mostly from advanced scrum practitioners.
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- The Currency Format Kata A couple of days ago, I needed a function which is capable of printing out a certain amount in Hungarian currency format. At that time I found the implementation of this function challenging, so I decided to implement it on my own, without googling for an existing solution.
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- Testing the Stack Implementation I've created my own version of the exercise used during my first agile job interview in order to compare it to the result of the pair programming session of the job interview. The exercise was quite simple.
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- The First Agile Job Interview In one of my previous posts I was writing about a different kind of job interview. Today, I had the possibility to perform my first agile job interview, and although I only got twenty minutes, it was very well spent. For this twenty minutes, I planned a pair programming session with the candidate.
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- jMock versus Mockito I've been using jMock for more than a year now, but recently I came across mockito. In this post, I'll show the difference between jMock and mockito - without judging which one is better - using the basic features I've been using the most often from jMock.
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