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A Fresh Look at 'Technical Debt'
A Technical Debt Workshop was recently held to improve our industry's understanding of and approach to "technical debt", resulting in some interesting ideas. Among them, changing our perception of the problem to focus on "assets" rather than "debt", an idea now receiving quite a bit of attention by people such as Michael Feathers and Brian Marick.
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FIT/Fitnesse Fixture Gallery 2.0 Released
Gojko's Fixture Gallery is a cookbook for FIT/Fitnesse fixtures and version 2.0 has been released with Java, C# and Python code samples.
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Discussion: Leaner Tools To Better Prepare Undergrads?
Greg Wilson challenged the aa-ftt community to support efforts to improve college graduates ability to deliver "product-quality code". Wilson's request primarily involves providing simplified versions of the tools used by professionals, such that they're digestible by undergraduate students.
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Cyclomatic Complexity Revisited
Enerjy studied tens of thousands of source code files and found the optimum Cyclomatic Complexity number is 11, with a 28% defect probability. In fact, you are more likely to encounter a defect if you have lower complexity - is it time to make your methods are more complicated?
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Fixture Gallery, a New Quick Reference For FitNesse How-To
Fixture Gallery is a new open doc cookbook by Gojko Adzic for FIT/FitNesse tests. It provides developers with a quick overview of the most important fixture types and concepts for agile acceptance testing using the FIT framework.
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DbFit 1.0 With Enhanced Querying Capabilities and User Docs
Gojko Adzic has recently announced the version 1.0 release of DbFit, his popular FIT/FitNesse extension used for practicing TDD on database code.
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Should the Customer Care about Agile?
The involvement of customer in an Agile project is taken for granted, however in many situations, intentionally or unintentionally, the customer may not follow the Agile practices. An interesting discussion on the Extreme Programming group tries to decipher the situation and find possible solutions.
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LINQ Framework Design Guidelines
Now that LINQ has been finalized and released, it is time to start thinking about the ways to use it. Keith Farmer even talks about using it eliminate subclasses. But before we get into that, let us take a look at the official guidance from Microsoft.
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Design and Code Reviews : The Good, Bad and Ugly
Kirk Knoernschild shares his thoughts about Design and Code reviews. He mentions that such reviews promise to improve software quality, ensure compliance with standards, and serve as a valuable teaching tool for developers. However, the way they are performed affects their value. In some organizations they might really add whereas in others a review might just be a part of the bureaucracy.
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Debate about Testing and Recoverability: Object Oriented vs. Functional Programming Languages
In his latest blog post, Michael Feathers argued that object oriented programming languages offer some built-in features that facilitate testing and are therefore more recovery friendly than functional languages. Proponents of functional languages expressed strong disagreement with this statement, which provoked a very passionate debate in the blog community.
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Cockburn on Testing: Real Programmers have GUTs
In a moment of relaxation, Alistair Cockburn had the insight that we may be quibbling over inconsequentialities: "test before" or "test after," what's important to professional programmers is Good Unit Tests. Eureka!
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Crunch Mode And Making Superstars Average
James Golick and Reg Braithwaite discuss the often overlooked realities of how putting teams into "Crunch Mode" can have undesirable results. The discussion looks at various ways applying pressure to a team often results in putting your project into not better but worse shape and how teams and managers might benefit by taking a different approach.
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White: A New Windows UI Developer Testing Framework
The White project is an automated testing framework for Win32, WinForm, WPF and SWT (java) applications. Use it in combination with your favorit xUnit framework just like WatiN to perform user acceptance testing.
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TDD: Essential Skill or Architectural Landmine?
At JAOO '07 Bob Martin asserted: "it is irresponsible for a developer to ship a line of code he has not executed in a unit test." In this InfoQ video, Martin debated with another well respected software thought leader, Jim Coplien, on this and other topics, including Design by Contract vs. TDD and how much up-front architecture is needed to keep a system consistent with the business domain model.
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Does "Done" Mean "Shippable"?
There has been a lot of discussion on various agile forums and blogs about the difference between 'Done' and 'Shippable'. It might sound like both mean the same, however discussions on the lists and various blogs suggest that these are still widely misunderstood, mis-used terms. Here's a roundup of recommendations about how to handle "Done."