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Category Archives: Agile

September 7, 2010: On Writing Bad Code

1 Comment Posted by on September 7, 2010

I’ve been working on my tutorial session for WindyCityRails (tickets still available…). The session is about how to test when you are working in a legacy app that doesn’t have tests. Naturally, that requires some legacy code for the attendees to work with during the tutorial. My own worst Rails messes are either back in [...]

Agile

XP or not XP, that is the question. The answer is XP.

Leave a Comment Posted by on August 2, 2010

While I’m commemorating anniversaries this summer, I just remembered another one. Ten years ago this summer was when I first read the original Kent Beck “white book”, Extreme Programming Explained, which is one of only a couple of books that completely changed the way I approach whatever it is that I do. Considering that I’ve [...]

Agile

July 16, 2010: Why Not Four?

3 Comments Posted by on July 16, 2010

Not much time this morning, not many accumulated links. So just a little bit today. Book Status Still writing the new parts of the legacy coding chapter, last night a little bit on removing dependencies. I think only one more section to go before that’s a complete draft. Next up, I think, is making the [...]

Agile

Pair Programming, or Two of a Kind

5 Comments Posted by on July 12, 2010

Repeating yourself is clearly an occupational hazard of blogging. I’ve been trying to put together a post about pair programming for a while. Somewhat randomly, I found myself wandering through my blog archives at Pathfinder, and I came across this little essay, which was the last thing I wrote at Pathfinder before, shall we say, [...]

Agile

July 9, 2010: Beta 4 Released and More

Leave a Comment Posted by on July 9, 2010

Update Beta 4 of Rails Test Prescriptions is now available, with two new chapters, one on Rcov and coverage in general, and one on writing better tests. Buy here. While I’m in the self-promoting mode, the book is also available for pre-order at Amazon and other exciting locations. More Promotion And while I’m here, I [...]

Agile, Dropbox, iPad, Kent Beck, Mocha, Typing

June 16, 2010: What Shoulda We Do?

Leave a Comment Posted by on June 16, 2010

Top Story Thoughtbot talks about their plans for Shoulda moving forward. The big takeaway is that, while the context library will be separated out for use in Test::Unit, both Shoulda style and Shoulda effort will be focused on RSpec integration. I have some complicated thoughts about this one. I’m thrilled that Shoulda is being maintained [...]

Agile, Git, PDF, Relevance, RSpec, Shoulda

May 17: The Happy Streets of Wilmette

Leave a Comment Posted by on May 17, 2010

Book Status The Cucumber chapter is nearing final edit for beta. I cleared up a handful of errata, of which probably the most serious was a mistake on how to get the fixture data to pass the first test in the book. I’m hoping to get Beta 3 out later this week, and then I [...]

Agile, Consulting, Gems, Onion, RailsRx, Rubinius

May 13, 2010: The Rules of Agile Estimation

1 Comment Posted by on May 13, 2010

Top Story JRuby 1.5 is out. Highlights include improved Rails 3 support, better support for Windows, better FFI support, better startup time (yay!) and a lot of other tweaks and fixes. Book Update Still Cucumbering, hope to finish today. The book is still on sale, of course. And I’d still love to see more comments [...]

Agile, Apple, Estimates, iPad, JRuby, Kent Beck, Newton, Potterverse, RailsConf

April 15, 2010: The Library of Congress Recommends the Following Tweets

Leave a Comment Posted by on April 15, 2010

Top Story As part of the Chirp conference, Twitter and the Library of Congress jointly announced that the Library will be storing Twitter’s entire public archive. I’m sure your expecting an easy joke about how many sandwiches the LoC now knows about in their archive, or about how scholarly papers about the archive will be [...]

Agile, Bundler, iPad, Library of Congress, Pair Programming, Pragmatic, Ruby, Twitter

April 13, 2010: iAd, youAd, weAll Ad

Leave a Comment Posted by on April 13, 2010

Top Story iPads. Lots of them popping up in and around work. Probably some more coherent impressions coming later. Wait, once again, Twitter has a big announcement after I start writing this. This time, they are going to start placing ads in the Twitter stream in various ways to be announced today. My quick reactions: [...]

Agile, Apple, Bundler, iPad, JRuby, Ruby, standup, Yehuda

Rails Rx Standup: April 12, 2010

Leave a Comment Posted by on April 12, 2010

Top Story For a while, it looked like the top story was going to be Apple’s new developer Rule 3.3.1, described here by John Gruber. More on that in a second. But the real top story is the news that Twitter has bought Tweetie, intending to rebrand it as Twitter for iPhone, and dropping the [...]

Agile, Apple, Git, RSpec, standup, testing, This American Life, Twitter

The Agile Bet

Leave a Comment Posted by on January 3, 2010

And now some testimony from Brother Nicely-Nicely Johnson, I mean, James Turner, from O’Reilly Radar: The Cult of Scrum: If Agile is the teachings of Jesus, Scrum is every abuse ever perpetrated in his name. In many ways, Scrum as practiced in most companies today is the antithesis of Agile, a heavy, dogmatic methodology that [...]

Agile, Rants

The Point of it All

1 Comment Posted by on November 15, 2009

In true blog form, a declarative statement: Hear ye, hear ye! Any so-called Agile team that ever tries to translate “points” into actual units of time is presumed dysfunctional until proven otherwise. You’ve done it, I’ve done it, we’ve all done it. Doesn’t make it a good idea. In the spirit of my last post, [...]

Agile, Over Proclaiming, Projects

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