There are a lot of ways in which you can do two or more things at once and succeed only in doing them very poorly, so I’m always in search of a way to do multiple things at once but to actually get value out of both things. As a programmer with an ever-longer commute,…
An Extraordinary Claim I was talking to a friend the other day, and he relayed a conversation that he’d had with a co-worker. They were discussing writing unit tests and the co-worker claimed that he writes unit tests regularly, but discards them and never checks them into source control. I was incredulous at this, so…
Micro-Scrum A week or two ago, I read Stephen Walther’s blog post “Scrum in 5 Minutes” and reading his description of the backlog reminded me of a practice that I’ve been getting a lot of mileage out of lately. My practice, inspired by Kent Beck in his book Test Driven Development By Example, is to…
Gut Reaction I was talking with someone about possible approaches to an API the other day. He asked me if I’d favor a method that took a parameter and had a return value or if I’d prefer a method that was void and took two parameters but with one as a ref parameter. My immediate,…
