Author Archives: Liz

Six thinking hats

Posted on January 22, 2009 by Liz

I’ve been wanting to try out Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats for a while now, and finally got the opportunity in a workshop last week. I was working with a team who had a vague understanding of the roles … Continue reading →

Posted in breaking models, coaching | 5 Comments

Who’s the best person to fix this?

Posted on January 16, 2009 by Liz

I hate blame cultures. If you hate them too, then you don’t need me to tell you why. If you don’t, you probably haven’t worked in one yet. At one client, they have a strong dislike for blame cultures. Unfortunately, … Continue reading →

Posted in nlp | 7 Comments

Standing-up dragging on?

Posted on January 14, 2009 by Liz

There’s a standard format for stand-ups that goes: What did you do yesterday? What are you going to do today? As well as this, it helps to keep the focus on things that are interesting to the team. Sometimes this … Continue reading →

Posted in learning | 1 Comment

Love for Pigs and Chickens

Posted on January 12, 2009 by Liz

A phrase frequently used in the Scrum teams I’ve been involved in – as well as a few of the XP teams – is “Pigs and Chickens”. Googling the origin, I found out where it came from. Like many terms … Continue reading →

Posted in scrum | 4 Comments

C# mocks in action

Posted on December 10, 2008 by Liz

Mike and Gabriel both posted comments to show how the Cowhand example in my last post might look and evolve with different mocking frameworks. They’ve used FluentSpec and Rhino Mocks respectively. Thanks, Mike and Gabriel! It was a pleasure to … Continue reading →

Posted in bdd | Leave a comment

Given, when, then and examples for classes

Posted on December 10, 2008 by Liz

Some of us have taken to writing comments in our BDD classes to give us Given, When, Then at a unit level. So, if I’m writing examples for a cowhand, I might write something like this: public class CowhandTest { … Continue reading →

Posted in bdd | 9 Comments

The problem with Scrum

Posted on December 2, 2008 by Liz

Spurred by Dave Anderson’s blog pointing at Tobias Meyer’s blog… I once told this story to a group of people I was training as coaches. The problem with Waterfall Once upon a time some people noticed that their software projects … Continue reading →

Posted in learning models | 1 Comment

Dan and I talk about BDD at Oopsla 2007

Posted on December 1, 2008 by Liz

Back last year, Vlad Gitlevich kindly made a video of Dan and I talking about BDD. We concentrated almost exclusively on the principles rather than the technology, which means the video is still very relevant. Particularly we talked about how … Continue reading →

Posted in bdd, stories | Leave a comment

fail() failed…

Posted on December 1, 2008 by Liz

Antony Marcano’s written a great post on testing for exceptions in a way which makes the example much easier to read, and keeps the Given / When / Then flow intact. I like this very much, and will be doing … Continue reading →

Posted in bdd | 2 Comments

Four ways of handling Givens

Posted on November 18, 2008 by Liz

A Given is the context in which a feature is used When we write code, we want to know that it works. As developer, I want to know how to tell this before I even start coding, so that I … Continue reading →

Posted in bdd | Tagged | 2 Comments