This is an old post that got lost in a technology shuffle. I was reminded of it recently while reading Tom DeMarco’s great book Slack.
One of the things I do when I am not working is play guitar. I also study guitar, though I have made slow progress over the years. It is still fun. One of my favorite teachers is Ronnie Earle. I have an old VHS tape of his in which he shares his philosophy of playing. And he makes this statement that has stuck with me for years: ”Sometimes, you have to leave some space between the notes.”
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Popularity: 25% [?]
November 17th, 2008
Roger
My favorite class to teach is TDD. I like to challenge developers to stretch their brains into new territory. They do it every day in other ways. Learning TDD is a level higher than solving algorithm and design challenges. It is about changing the way you approach programming altogether. And my favorite situation is to see the light go on in the mind of someone who starts out as a skeptic. “I’m here because my boss said I had to go” kind of people. Great fun.
Sometime I get challenges back. By now, after doing this for a few years, I can answer many of the predicatable questions pretty easily. Every once in a while I get some harder questions. I thought I would share some of these and the answers I came up with.
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Popularity: 23% [?]
While reading Scott Bain’s great book Emergent Design, I was reminded of a story. It took place a couple of years ago inside a very tall building in a very large city. I was giving an early version of my Test Driven Development workshop. There were about 25 developers to entertain. I asked the standard calibration questions:
- How many of you are doing TDD now? Answer: none
- How many of you do unit testing? Answer: none
- How many of you know what unit testing is? Answer: some
- Of those of you who know what it is, do you think it is a good idea? Answer: yes
- Why, then, do you not do it? Answer: we don’t have time
It was not an unusual set of answers, of course. I have had that same dialog with more than one group.
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Popularity: 13% [?]
When talking audiences who are new to agile software development, we often claim that there is an erroneous belief that agile teams eschew documentation. I was going to put it differently at first, but I have always wanted to use the word “eschew”. It is one of those words that appear in print much more often than in speech. Maybe because it sounds like a sneeze? If you have to look it up like I usually do, I will save you the trouble this time. Eschew means to avoid.
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Popularity: 7% [?]
I recently fell into a black hole. I was creating a demonstration for Cruise Control. When I got to the part about running FitNesse tests via ant, I got all wrapped around the axle with java classpaths. I don’t know about you, but classpaths are my nemesis. It took me a long time to get it right, way too long. That is a black hole - a time sink that you didn’t anticipate and, once you fall into it, it has no obvious end point. The solution seems right around the corner, just one more experiment away. Experiment because that always seems like the most expeditious route to success - because taking the time to actually study the situation will obviously take more time than the next little experiment. It is a common pitfall for software developers. Black holes can quickly nullify your estimates.
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Popularity: 11% [?]
Last week I was doing a training session in Melbourne, Australia. I had an especially energetic and interested group of people to work with. In basic agile training, a 1.5 day workshop, I introduced Test Driven Development very briefly, cutting it short because we were going to spend the whole next day doing a TDD lab. I mainly gave a sales pitch including the statement that, after decades of writing software, learning TDD made me a better programmer by at least a factor of four. That is a pretty fuzzy claim, but I make it for effect.
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Popularity: 12% [?]