Industrial Logic Blog

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 […]

Mob programming is great stuff! We have found it to be the best way (so far) to teach technical skills to teams of programmers, and the best way for them to continue developing and teaching their skills well beyond our workshops. Here are a set of tips that help us to make mobbing more successful […]

Several decades ago, the software industry was obsessed with counting lines of code per programmer per month. That metric practice famously drove teams to create bloated, defect-ridden software products. After only a few years, the practice was abandoned as detrimental. Sadly, the biases and flaws behind that practice are with us still, influencing our practices […]

It’s great to have reliable tests in your pipeline to avoid escaped defects and to shorten the feedback loop for your programmers. Sometimes the build-and-test processes becomes a productivity-limiting problem. What do you do when your test suite takes too long to run?

When we are refactoring, and especially when we are teaching refactoring, our partners are surprised to see us extracting methods which are only (currently) called once. There is often an assumption that the only reason for extracting a method is so that you can call it from multiple places in the code base.</p> While this […]

When testing tricky collaborators, we may create fake or mock objects to make life easier. In effect, we draw a line: on one side, real objects participate; on the other, it’s fakes and/or mocks. Consequences of the Line A common strategy for testing with mocks: Test standalone objects directly Use fakes and mocks to test […]