Exploration Through Example

Example-driven development, Agile testing, context-driven testing, Agile programming, Ruby, and other things of interest to Brian Marick
191.8 167.2 186.2 183.6 184.0 183.2 184.6

Sun, 06 Feb 2005

Three books

I'd read chunks of Michael Feathers' book, Working Effectively With Legacy Code, before publication, but it's only on the last few plane rides that I've read it straight through. It's really good: gobs of experience distilled, delivered in a consistently readable style and with an encouraging, even gentle, tone.

The Pragmatically Publishing Programmers have just come out with Mike Mason's Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion. Since CVS and I have a stormy relationship, particularly regarding deleting directories, I bought the paper+PDF version post-haste.

Rick Mugridge and Ward Cunningham's Getting Fit for Developing Software is in copyedit now. They're at a particularly difficult game: writing for both nontechnical Customers or testers and programmers, weaving themes and a common thread of examples through what is inherently a lot of not-essentially-connected subtopics, tackling both How To and Why Bother. I was pleased and honored to write the foreword. But there's more: the book brings with it Rick's Fit library, with his DoFixture that's along the lines of my StepFixture but seems to be much better (though I haven't used it yet). That and Rick's other fixtures will help Fit a lot, I think.

## Posted at 21:26 in category /misc [permalink] [top]

Notes from a business traveller

You can get an entire exit row to yourself if you travel to a Superbowl team's home city on the evening of the Superbowl.

But once you check in, those same old questions come crowding into your mind:

  • What's with having no power outlets within reach of anything moveable that might need power? It was bad enough when the iron couldn't be plugged in except in the most awkward corner of the room, but it's truly annoying in this day of lounging on the bed with a low-battery laptop.

  • Who exactly is it that thinks those bathtub/shower drains that you open by pulling them up and close by stepping on or near them - like, say, one might while rinsing one's hair - are a good idea? Does anyone but hotels buy them?

  • And why do fitted sheets for king-size beds never fit?

## Posted at 21:25 in category /junk [permalink] [top]

About Brian Marick
I consult mainly on Agile software development, with a special focus on how testing fits in.

Contact me here: marick@exampler.com.

 

Syndication

 

Agile Testing Directions
Introduction
Tests and examples
Technology-facing programmer support
Business-facing team support
Business-facing product critiques
Technology-facing product critiques
Testers on agile projects
Postscript

Permalink to this list

 

Working your way out of the automated GUI testing tarpit
  1. Three ways of writing the same test
  2. A test should deduce its setup path
  3. Convert the suite one failure at a time
  4. You should be able to get to any page in one step
  5. Extract fast tests about single pages
  6. Link checking without clicking on links
  7. Workflow tests remain GUI tests
Permalink to this list

 

Design-Driven Test-Driven Design
Creating a test
Making it (barely) run
Views and presenters appear
Hooking up the real GUI

 

Popular Articles
A roadmap for testing on an agile project: When consulting on testing in Agile projects, I like to call this plan "what I'm biased toward."

Tacit knowledge: Experts often have no theory of their work. They simply perform skillfully.

Process and personality: Every article on methodology implicitly begins "Let's talk about me."

 

Related Weblogs

Wayne Allen
James Bach
Laurent Bossavit
William Caputo
Mike Clark
Rachel Davies
Esther Derby
Michael Feathers
Developer Testing
Chad Fowler
Martin Fowler
Alan Francis
Elisabeth Hendrickson
Grig Gheorghiu
Andy Hunt
Ben Hyde
Ron Jeffries
Jonathan Kohl
Dave Liebreich
Jeff Patton
Bret Pettichord
Hiring Johanna Rothman
Managing Johanna Rothman
Kevin Rutherford
Christian Sepulveda
James Shore
Jeff Sutherland
Pragmatic Dave Thomas
Glenn Vanderburg
Greg Vaughn
Eugene Wallingford
Jim Weirich

 

Where to Find Me


Software Practice Advancement

 

Archives
All of 2006
All of 2005
All of 2004
All of 2003

 

Join!

Agile Alliance Logo