Over the course of the past week, I have been made aware about the perception what Software Craftsmanship is about. I asked two persons about their perception on Software Craftsmanship, and I got similar responses: The public perception seems to be that Craftsmanship is all about code, katas, and Coding Dojos. Unfortunately this is quite not all that is to Software Craftsmanship, and here is what I think anyone talking about Software Craftsmanship should be aware about.
Continue reading All of this is Software Craftsmanship, tooCategory Archives: Software Craft
Software Craft
Refactoring on the green bar
Jason Gorman put up a video on the Open-Closed principle out on his blog today. I claimed on Twitter, that he was doing a refactoring while having a red bar. Over the discussion, I decided to put up the way how I would have developed the fibonacci extension while refactoring on a green bar on my blog.
Continue reading Refactoring on the green barProfessionalism
Inspired by a Tweet from Jason Gorman I had to look up the definition of professionalism in my MacBook Pro. Amazingly I found the following:
the competence or skill expected of a professional : the key to quality and efficiency is professionalism.
• the practicing of an activity, esp. a sport, by professional rather than amateur players : the trend toward professionalism.
Let’s discuss this in the light of testing and Software Craftsmanship.
Continue reading ProfessionalismProductive Partnerships
Today I crossed the path of a blog post on Why should we care about software craftsmanship. It’s basically a two part blog entry from Gael Fraiteur who visited the Software Craftsmanship conference in London, and reflected afterwards back on what Software Craftsmanship is to him, and where he sees problems with the notion of the term heavily influenced by a talk from David Harvey called Danger – Software Craftsmen at Work. Uncle Bob Martin wrote an excellent reply to the concerns here, which I won’t repeat. From my perspective there is one important argument missing: on customers, business representatives, and project stakeholders. That said, I agree to everything from Uncle Bob, but here is what I would add.
Continue reading Productive PartnershipsTesting Craftsmanship
At the Agile Testing Days I led a small session at the Open Space day on the relevance of craftsmanship with testing. Simon Schrijver and Zeger van Hese provided me their feedback on the Software Craftsmanship Manifesto as well as the Ethics we came up shortly after publishing the manifesto. When the momentum for this discussion seemed to decrease, the expected unexpected within Open Space session happened. Here is my summary and my thoughts on it.
Continue reading Testing CraftsmanshipWhat you always wanted to know about Testing and Quality Assurance – Testing as a profession
Last week I attended the CONQUEST 2010 conference. As I was invited to be part of an experts panel, I answered some questions from the conference attendees about testing, quality, and how all of this works. In particular I was invited as an expert on Agile testing. The session was voice recorded, in order for the transcript to be provided online in a few weeks. Since it will be on German and we had to restrict our answers to two minutes, I asked the organizers, Karin Vosseberg and Andreas Spillner, whether I may translate the questions to English and publish them on my blog, and got the permission to do so. So, this is the first set of questions (from the CONQUEST 2010 attendees) and answers (from myself). The first set of questions is filed under the topic “Testing as a profession”.
The case for slack
Some while ago, J.B. Rainsberger posted a case for slack, and that you might be sabotaging your peoples training. I think it was Kent Beck who pointed me to the self-similarity of nature in eXtreme programming explained. In this post I’m going to take a closer look on how we learn, and how nature is self-similar in this regard, and what we may derive from this.
A coding challenge
I got a quick coding challenge. Since I didn’t find a solution to the problem, I don’t dare to call it a kata, though this might become one. The challenge is easily described: Write a converter for Gregorian Calendar dates to Nepali Dates, also called Bikram Samwat – and back. The format MM/DD/YYYY shall be used for both calendars, not need to go for the unicode based Nepali names of the months – but it would be a nice addition.
You may choose any programming language as you may see fit. You may trawl any knowledge together that you need to fulfill the requirement. There are a few reference converters on the web. And I’m sure you will find them as well. I don’t put a due date on this, but if you get me something until end of this week, that would be awesome.
XP2010: On tree hugging
While I’m at the XP2010 in Trondheim, I try to update my blog with some of the interesting sessions I attend. This is the write-up from an Open Space session that bothered to think about the tendency to go more and more meta in the Agile movement after all, and whether means that we have nothing really new to talk about-
Continue reading XP2010: On tree huggingShift
Matt Heusser wrote about the question Are testers going away? in a blog entry yesterday. As I started to write a comment on his blog, I noticed that I should selfishly make an own blog entry out of it. So, in case you haven’t read Matt’s entry, go there and read first, maybe.
Continue reading Shift