Author Archives: Liz

Darren and I had a chat about my article on arrogance. He said he didn’t like my “anti-pragmatic” stance. I was confused. “But… I wasn’t anti-pragmatic. Was I? I said that idealists need to listen more to pragmatists. I parodied … Continue reading →

A discussion on the Yahoo XP group regarding refactoring long methods into smaller ones coincided with me writing the code below. This is from my most recent test class, which is 180+ lines and growing: public void testThatRefundingTwoToysBoughtOnDifferentDaysDoesNotCauseError() throws Exception … Continue reading →

I spoke to some of my colleagues back in London and was reliably informed (again) that the ratio of idealists to pragmatists amongst them is in fact lower than I made out in my last post. We did agree, though, … Continue reading →

arrogant adj. Having or displaying a sense of overbearing self-worth or self-importance. Marked by or arising from a feeling or assumption of one’s superiority toward others: an arrogant contempt for the weak. Thank you, dictionary.com. “Do you know,” said Roy, … Continue reading →

I’ve not touched Ruby yet, but I’m insatiably curious, so I talked to Darren about it. As far as I can work out, dynamic languages in general are fantastic if you’re running Test Driven Design; because it’s not the compiler … Continue reading →

Last week, Alan pointed me towards Dale Emery’s post on <a href="http://www.dhemery.com/cwd/2003/06/the_value_question.html”>the value question. Reading it made me think a lot about several things which I’m trying to accomplish; today, tomorrow, and with my life in general. It’s been an … Continue reading →

All problems, from wars to software bugs, are caused by a combination of the following: lack of communication lack of courage lack of imagination lack of time. It’s arguable that the first three are products of the last.

Matt Ryall responded to my post on documentation with some suggestions for making it easier. I finally persuaded my brain to give up some of the thoughts that it didn’t like (because they’d result in doing documentation). This isn’t particularly … Continue reading →

Here’s a quick test for the fence from my last post. My customer wants a fence which allows sheep to graze in a field, and prevents sheep from wandering outside of the field. public class FenceTest extends TestCase { public … Continue reading →

Jim and his colleagues (hope you don’t mind me using you as an example) write documentation as the reference point to code. Then, one group of people write the tests, and one group of people implement the functionality, both working … Continue reading →