Author Archives: Liz

Introducing Tyburn

Posted on February 8, 2008 by Liz

When I first started working with JBehave, I wrote a Tetris game. I had trouble finding Swing harnesses that didn’t depend on JUnit. So I wrote one. JBehave 2.0 won’t include Swing support. The harness was completely independent of JBehave … Continue reading →

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Your Horoscope for February*

Posted on February 1, 2008 by Liz

How people Sometimes it’s nice to get your head down without any distractions, but beware – are you cut off from the rest of the world? No one is stopping to wait for you. Get the most important things done … Continue reading →

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Given, When, Then – the only way?

Posted on January 28, 2008 by Liz

Someone told me that out there, somewhere, are people who believe that “Given, When, Then” is the only way to analyse a story. I don’t believe it’s true. Sometimes there are more concise ways to get the same information. For … Continue reading →

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Find your own way to cook

Posted on January 17, 2008 by Liz

A mother was cooking a joint of meat for her family. She cut off a large slice from the side of the joint, then put both pieces into the gravy. “Why are you doing that?” her daughter asked. “It helps … Continue reading →

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10 signs of work goodness – revisited

Posted on December 13, 2007 by Liz

You know work is good when: Your smile is infectious, even on the tube. Every day you find out something new… …and pass on something to someone else. You wonder how you’re going to have fun, not when. No tunnel … Continue reading →

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A Mind of Its Own

Posted on November 30, 2007 by Liz

I’m reading the book “A Mind of Its Own”, by Cordelia Fine. I sometimes find it hard to make headway with this kind of material and put it down after the first couple of chapters, but for whatever reason this … Continue reading →

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Bug Driven Development: a danger of delivering the pretty GUIs first

Posted on November 19, 2007 by Liz

After my last post, Negin and I were quite pleased that we’d got as far as we had. So was our Business Analyst. “So, this story that was estimated at 3 days,” she said. “Can I say it’s only taken … Continue reading →

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BDD: Bug Driven Development

Posted on November 16, 2007 by Liz

Today, Negin and I paired on a brand new piece of work. “We’ll need to create this domain object,” she said, “and a database table.” “I don’t want to do that,” I said. “I’d rather fix the stuff that’s broken.” … Continue reading →

Posted in bdd | Tagged | 13 Comments

Crazy like a fox.

Posted on November 14, 2007 by Liz

At my current client, everyone loves BDD, and everyone starts their tests with the word ‘should’, describing the behaviour of the associated class. I’m currently looking at this code: public class PrimaryMixingIteratorTest extends EasyMockObjectTestBase{ public void testShouldIterateLikeAFox() throws Exception { … Continue reading →

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When do I refactor code?

Posted on November 13, 2007 by Liz

This question has kicked around a bit at Thoughtworks lately, sparked by this article: http://blogs.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/archive/2007/11/01/technical-debt-2.aspx. I thought I’d blog what I do, since a few bits of feedback lead me to believe I might be good at it. I don’t … Continue reading →

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