Potato I have

Okay, I’ve been bitten by the podcast bug. Listening, not creating. Now I’m trawling through old stuff I missed because I was still reading blogs. IT Conversations is proving valuable.

Here’s one I heard this weekend from Kent Beck on developer testing (recorded November 2004!). TDD and refactoring are the two big software development epiphanies for me in the last 4-5 years, and Beck literally wrote the book on TDD.

In this podcast Beck highlights the accountability aspect of TDD, and it resonated big time for me. I was also encouraged by his comments on his own difficulties writing tests being due to “not being a good enough designer. Yet.” I think that stance/insight would help more developers move into TDD.

This is reflections on, not an introduction to, TDD — for that, I don’t know a better treatment than his short, participatory text. I think it’s hard to really get it until you intentionally write that stupid little hardcoded implementation that you’re going to change in a minute … just after you write the next test.

Fowler’s CodeAsDocumentation entry starts:

One of the common elements of agile methods is that they raise programming to a central role in software development - one much greater than the software engineering community usually does.

The overall entry is concerned with documentation, and it rings as true as most everything else I’ve read from him over the years. But what caught my attention this time is the quote above: it’s a simple and obvious statement, but it compels me to post anyway.

It seems to me that so much falls out of the primacy given (or not) to coding and the code itself, and I’m tempted to plunge into an essay on the political, historical and philosophical aspects of all this. But this is a blog entry, I’m not supposed to spend the time here.

Fowler links Jack Reeves’s essays; they’re just superb, not only for treatment of the subject, but also as a kind of memoir of trying to stimulate a debate.