Category Archives: Uncategorized

Manual Test-First

Working on a team that’s not yet onto the value of unit testing, I frequently encounter what Michael Feathers calls “legacy code.” It is not unit-tested and can’t be. That doesn’t mean I need to forget test-first.

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James Shore on Good Design

Quality is one of those ineffable abstractions. Ask ten people, “What is good design?” Get twenty answers. But Jim Shore’s answer is actually worth something. A good software design minimizes the time required to create, modify, and maintain the software … Continue reading

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Break Your (Software) Process Addiction

How many times have you heard someone say—or maybe you’ve even said it yourself— “Yeah, it’s a hack. But we don’t have time to do it right.” Frankly, this one goes in the same category as popular rubbish like:

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What Happens When You Develop on Production Data

Warning: Perl programming ahead. Here’s the story about how I got to do episode 3 of the be the story podcast all over again from scratch.

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The Intuitiveness of Time-boxed Iterations

It started as a math project for my fourth-grade daughter and turned into a lesson in project management. I flipped a coin 10 times, counted 3 times that it came up heads, and recorded this on a bar chart: the … Continue reading

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Honestly

(Note: This is a post from my online journal, imported into this blog because it tells the story of a real software project I worked on. Who says software developers don’t have war stories? -TimK) I know why good people … Continue reading

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