Lisa Crispin motivated this morning an entry on What I’d go back and tell myself. Compared to Lisa I would like to get back a few years more towards my time in university that started in 1999 (yes, I’m not that old zealot). At the time around 2001 I took a course called Software practical that was divided in a theoretical leacture and a practical group work to build a system. During the lecture there was eXtreme Programming mentioned as a new technique with a delightning practice called Test-driven development. By that time I did not get the point and it took until 2008 to realize the benefits of test-driven development. Going back to 2001 or even 1999 I would tell myself that I really should read about test-driven development, refactoring, design patterns and unit tests and dive into more topics. Nearly two years from now I started to read on these things and get the ideas from the great books out there. Currently I feel the need to get even with the books, but am really overwhelmed so far from the pile of books that lies in front of me.

Another thing I would like to tell myself going back into the past, is that I will truly make a good start in software testing and development and see the opportunities to improve my work. Going back to 2005 I would tell myself, that I should not waste the time to investigate on PhD positions at the universities, but rather get some real hands-on in the business. Most of practices and techniques I use today I learned when I was out from university and I’m glad to have learned all this stuff.