There is certainly more legacy code in this world than any other kind of code. I say this with only anecdotal evidence, but given the amount of time people have been writing software, the amount of time people have been creating new softwar ...

I’ve heard of several teams programming in mobs using the concept of the mobodoro. I believe in the notion of parallel development, so I’m not going to claim I am the sole inventor or coiner of the term, though I believe I introduced it at ...

I started writing a long, wordy post all about ECO mapping, how it works, why you should use it, and the entire process of generating the map from the top, down. It was WAY too much. Instead, I want to introduce you to ECO mapping from the ...

Michael Feathers defines legacy code as code without tests. This means code written years ago, with a good test harness, is not legacy code. It also means the code written yesterday, without tests, IS legacy code. We don’t need to dig very ...

There are many people who would likely say I don’t handle some social sitations with the utmost grace, and they wouldn’t be wrong. I’m human and my emotions can get the better of me more often than I would like. Nevetheless there are interp ...

I remember a time, long ago, when WordPress was a small, scrappy piece of software which was dedicated primarily to the publishing of blogs and basic site content. It wasn’t the most fully-featured CMS on the planet, but it worked well eno ...

For the moment, let's go ahead and make an assumption: automated tests (unit tests, integration tests, etc.) make code safer to write, update and change. Even if tests break, it says something about how the code was written and pulled toge ...

A couple weeks ago, I attended Agile Open Northwest. As with every other Agile Open conference I attend there were plenty of eye-opening experiences. One experience which surprised me was actually a session I facilitated. I went in with a ...

It's extremely common for developers who work in statically typed languages to talk about how much easier their code is to maintain and that the code is self-documenting because of the type system.  However, these same programmers often ta ...

Any software community has a contingent which agrees that tests are a good thing and testing first leads us to a place of stable, predictable software. With this in mind, the biggest complaint I've heard from people is "testing takes too ...