Sharpen Your Knives
You’ve heard the old adage about the lumberjack who—in order to cut a tree in an hour—will take 45 minutes to sharpen the saw? This…
Category: Design
Good Design, part IV: The Role of Tests
We’ve seen how refactoring becomes the primary design activity on an Agile team. Diligent, confident refactoring is possible to the degree that the code is…
Good Design, Part II: Code Smells
Last month we talked about good software design and introduced the notion of code smells. Code smells are names given to those instinctual thoughts you…
Good Design
I’ve learned not to assume a team has experienced a variety of software design skills. Some are writing elegant functional-paradigm code in archaic, challenging languages.…
How TDD is More Than Simply Unit Testing
I was recently asked about the difference between unit-testing and Test-Driven Development (TDD). Specifically, why—if the end results are the same—would I recommend TDD over…
Agile Architecture – It is NOT an Oxymoron!
Many companies adopting agile have a hard time with the architecture and design of their large systems. They like the concept of agile, but can’t…
