Industrial Logic Blog

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.

Agile is an adjective, guided by principles and realized in unlimited ways.

To measure how long they were “in the red”, Ward suggested that one programmer in the pair take on the additional responsibility of being the time keeper. They’d keep time of any period during which one or more tests were red.

During my time as a developer, I have come across wildly differing opinions on testing. Many would say that you absolutely, without a doubt, should write tests around the code you write. Others felt that testing was a waste of the developer’s time and energy. When I first began programming, I did not like writing […]

A team is asked to take on a special project but they feel uneasy because they lack all of the skills necessary for a successful outcome. Have you experienced that problem before? Perhaps a Skills Inventory could help. This is a skills inventory I helped a team create in the past (I’ve redacted their names […]

Synopsis Short builds enable responding to change, continuous code improvement, and keeping your customers happy. When the build slows beyond certain thresholds, there are predictable responses by a team that lead to slower builds, lower code quality, and continuous code rot. We’ll look into why this is, why it is worth investing in speeding up […]