You’re doing it wrong

Posted in The Industry with tags , , , on February 3, 2010 by moffdub

Consider this to be a warning shot across the bow to all of you pointy-haired project managers on Agile teams everywhere.

If you harass your developers once or twice every sprint about refactoring tasks that are open, prodding for when it’ll be done, complaining that they have no focus, and then saying that you don’t want to know the details and micro-manage how they spend their hours, you’re doing it wrong

If you push your developers to move on to the new stories on the front burner and then chide them later when older stories aren’t complete because they didn’t swarm the stories because they were working on something else, you’re doing it wrong.

If you spew the Agile dogma that the team members and task owners are the ones to say whether a task or story is complete and then turn around and try to trick your team into saying a task is done or a story is done-done-done when it isn’t, you’re doing it wrong.

If you have the nerve and lack of intellect to say during a Scrum that “testing is not part of the core business functionality”, you’re doing it wrong.

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Nowhere To Run: Best Of

Posted in Nowhere To Run with tags , , , on January 31, 2010 by moffdub

This week’s posting of Nowhere To Run will not occur this week.

Announcer: This is the best of Nowhere To Run. Today’s comic was originally posted on September 26, 2009. Please do not call in.

Announcer: And now, filling in for El Moffdo, Former Head Cheerleader Reina on Nowhere To Run!

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Announcer: You’re reading the EIP web-ring.

Literal Laws

Posted in Testing with tags , , , , on January 27, 2010 by moffdub

My friends, the code gods were watching me last week and filled me with the providence to contemplate test-driven development at just the right time to prepare me for an inter-team bru-ha-ha. The clarity I gained from T.I.N.O. was put to immediate use when explaining to another team why we don’t practice TDD exactly. Objects, I posited, and still posit, are best designed wholistically, because objects rarely exist in a vacuum.

That is the party line here on the Excellence In Programming web-ring, but that doesn’t mean we move on. No. Of course not. Let’s assume that we are total believers in dogmatic, hardcore TDD. That means we follow the three laws:

  1. You are not allowed to write any production code unless it is to make a failing unit test pass.
  2. You are not allowed to write any more of a unit test than is sufficient to fail; and compilation failures are failures.
  3. You are not allowed to write any more production code than is sufficient to pass the one failing unit test.

We are about to write a little service class that retrieves a data structure from the database, but we will strictly follow the three laws. Pay close, special attention to law #3. I want to see if I can arrive at the same code following these laws, especially law #3, as I normally do by my wholistic, top-down, design-by-code method.

First the test (law #2):

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