Agile Coach Journal

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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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 made it for effect.

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