Industrial Logic Blog

The manager looks across the room at the team members. It’s 8:45 and everyone should be in attendance. Where’s Rob? Surely he’s not still at his desk? “Okay let’s start on the left and go around the room,” the manager says, as she always does.

In A Tale of Two TDDers, I quickly documented what I see as two different defect-fixing behaviors of Test-Driven Development practitioners. I spent all of about ten minutes writing that blog. It generated a lot of interesting discussion, some of which bordered on deep misunderstanding. More detail would have helped. And so I dug through […]

I’m going to be using a metaphor that not everyone can relate to since not everyone is on a speaking circuit. My hope is that this metaphor will teach you two things: how to plan a conference talk, and how to approach doing big things quickly.

The story you are about to read is as much about customer responsiveness as it is about software development. The story lies at the intersection of the principles, Deliver Value Continuously and Make Safety A Prerequisite. Finally, the story is based on real-world experiences in a real code base. Let’s begin… A customer reports a […]

“Oh, no! We estimated 23 story points for the sprint, but we only turned in 20. We’ve failed the sprint!” It seems that a lot of teams, especially scrum and SAFe teams, are spending a lot of time on story point estimates. This is understandable, and also disappointing. You see, you can’t estimate your way […]

Characterization testing, aka Golden Master testing, is a technique where you apply known inputs to a process to verify the output against a known result. I have found this to be a great technique for testing legacy code that does not have many tests. However, my first use of this technique was at a nuclear power plant.

Many decades ago, people often had a stack of equipment for playing music and video. Typical stacks included a cassette player, compact disk player, VCR or DVD player, television, cable box for watching cable television and maybe even a turntable for listening to vinyl records. You’d need an audio/video (AV) receiver to take all of […]

Overview Recently we came across a need to use volatile. At the time my spider senses were tingling; I wasn’t sure. We confirmed that it was in fact necessary. Then we improved the implementation a touch, which removed the need to use the keyword. The Beginning I joined a mob while it was in the middle of […]

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is frequently misunderstood in ways that cause needless struggle, delay, and upset. Misunderstanding and misrepresentation have been painful enough that developers have cried out in frustration, sometimes declaring the whole practice harmful, pointless, or even “dead.”

An exceptional first time experience using a dog walking service points to the importance of delighting your customer.