Agile Otter Blog

Note: this was originally all plain text and a little shorter.  As more people have joined the conversation, and other supportive materials have come to mind, it is growing links and a little verbiage but this is only to support the idea: we don't have to settle for expediently cranking out horrible work between pointless meetings. We can do better.  Are we getting tired of the kind of "agile" where you don't really have any particular technical practices, change (and improvement) is entirely optional, and you pretty much do waterfall with additional overhead of meetings? Are we tired of seeing "sprints" and "iterations" used as ways to pressure people into working harder and longer (" pushing velocity "), with no training or learning or even autonomy? Are n-week death marches the ultimate expression of our values? Are we tired of the kind of "agile" that's all about buzzword compliance and rituals and motivationa...

TDD is a pretty simple system, as popularly described.  For an individual doing a kata or playing with some example code it is really just three steps. On card #44 of AgileInAFlash it looks like this: It's the right way to think about TDD, and the right way to get started. When you get to a real project in a team environment you have many other issues to consider.  In a modern team environment, with a DVCS, it looks more like this: Get the current code ( git pull , get clone , hg pull -u , whatever) Run all the tests and be sure they're all really green, to avoid blaming yourself for unrelated breakages. If there are no tests, write a trivial failing test (" assertTrue(false) ") to prove your testing setup (ide, scripts, makefiles) really work. Then delete the trivial test. Write one "real" red test. INSIST ON RED. Write code to turn it green. Local commit "save your game" Refactor (or intentionally choose not to). Check to...