Contents tagged with Extreme Programming
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The important of transparency in development
David talks about the value of transparency in development.
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Pair Programming and Pandemics
Pouya has posted about the dangers of illnesses when Pair Programming on our team blog.
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Learning from your Burn Down chart
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Removing dead code
What does your code terrain look like? Are there bodies of dead logic lying here and there? Maybe they helped briefly while you worked towards a better solution or perhaps they just fell victim to changing business rules. -
Do you have what it takes to be a Thycotic TDD Developer?
Thycotic is gearing up for a new product development cycle and we are looking to grow our team of passionate test-first developers. Our team is one of the best places to learn and improve your agile development skills. -
Agile Estimating and Planning with TargetProcess - RCC4
On Saturday, the Thycotic crew (well, only three of us this time) went down to Richmond to the forth Richmond Code Camp. It is a 2 hour drive but my new handy TomTom GPS did well - asides from one occasion where it decided to re-route us back through Washington DC when we were only 30 minutes from the event!
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Refactoring example in C# and VB.NET
Our very own Bryant Smith has revamped his conversion of Martin Fowler's refactoring example (originally in Java) to now cover both C# and VB.NET.
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Whitespace is a code smell
Do you space out your code so there are line breaks between the pieces of logic? Why do you think this is necessary? Typically this is done to separate chunks of logic so that they can be easily distinguished. If it is a complicated enough chunk, then it may even make sense to put a comment at the top of the chunk. At this point, the Agile police will jump on you and tell you to turn your comment into a method name and perform an Extract Method refactoring. This is great practice (fellow Agile police member here!) and it makes a lot of sense since it abstracts the concept and makes the code more self describing. -
Pair Programming improves your communication skills
Many developers in our industry prefer a dark corner to the presentation podium. This is often explained away with references to introverted personalities and geekish tendencies. While this may be true for certain individuals, there are definitely many benefits to breaking away from this stereotype. One of the best ways to progress in the business world is to develop strong communication skills - customers want to be understood and the combination with technical ability provides a powerful skillset when understanding problems and providing solutions. As with so many things in life, excellence in communication can be achieved through lots of practice.
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Will TDD become mainstream?
I have been asked a number of times in the last few years if I think TDD (Test Driven Development) will go mainstream. Firstly, we need to agree on what mainstream is – Wikipedia does not give any hard numbers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstream) but it seems like 20% would be a good number for software development (I pulled this out of thin area – please share your thoughts). For TDD to have that much mindshare (in the stubborn software development world) would firmly seat TDD as an established and accepted way of developing code. So how much mindshare does it have now? Again I don’t know how you would get a measure (Gartner studies maybe?) but my experiences with software development in the Washington DC Metro area makes me think it is far less than 20%.
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