Month: January 2008

What Test-Driven Development is…

I know this has been bandied about hither and yon by lots of people. But I still see statements like the one by James Bach quoted on Matt Heusser’s blog that “the part of the testing problem they address is a small fraction of the whole.” Well, yes. Of course it is.

Maybe that’s because Test-Driven Development (TDD) isn’t a testing technique. It’s a software development technique that happens to create a safety net of unit tests.

Or, to paraphrase Captain Jack Sparrow, Read More

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Categories: Tools and Techniques

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Agile Compensation

The subject of determining compensation for developers on Agile teams comes up from time to time on the mailing lists. I’m no HR specialist, and I don’t have any easy answers to this question. It seems certainly true that some people will have provided more value than others and should therefore be given more reward. It is also certainly true that if the reward system is geared only toward individual achievement, then teamwork will suffer. Beware the law of unintended consequences.

There’s a whole class of arguments, however, that can be discarded rather easily. Read More

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Categories: Individuals and Interactions

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What do you know?

A while back, I was working with a young and cocky software developer. He was a smart guy, and sure of his abilities. He had seven years of Java experience, he said, and he knew how to write code.

As he was a new member of the team, I described the strategy I’d planned for a bit of code. I showed him what I’d already written, and asked him to complete the functionality.

“But I can do it another way.” And he described a different technique. Read More

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Categories: Individuals and Interactions Responding to Change

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