Author Archives: ChrisEdwards

Turning Around an Agile Project Gone Awry

By ChrisEdwards | Published: August 1, 2007

To those who say, “We have tried Agile, and it just didn’t work” I would reply, “Well, the first time I rode a bicycle it hurt pretty bad, and it wasn’t fun.” Agile is easily done wrong. I have just started a new job, and the biggest reason the company hired me was to help […]

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Tests as a Targeting System

By ChrisEdwards | Published: July 28, 2007

Unit tests should tell you more than just if there is an error, they should tell you where it is. I was going through some of my older notes on unit testing and came across a note where I referred to unit tests as a “Targeting System” and it struck me as a very concrete […]

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Code Smell: Using the Debugger

By ChrisEdwards | Published: July 28, 2007

When you have a lot of code to look through to find an error, you often times use a debugger. You use the debugger to step through code to find out where it is failing. This is a code smell. CODE SMELL: If you find yourself using the debugger, your tests are not fine-grained enough. […]

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Tests as an Auto-Notification Process

By ChrisEdwards | Published: December 29, 2006

Looking at tests in a different light.
In looking at how tests help eliminate bugs, I realized that one way it does so is by automatically notifying you when something doesn’t work in the way the test specifies it “should”. This got me thinking about tests from a different perspective…as an auto-notification process.

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Thou Shalt Not Love Thy Code

By ChrisEdwards | Published: August 14, 2006

On my most recent project I have learned a very humbling, yet very useful lesson. Never fall in love with your code, or it will be too hard to let go. In the Agile world, your code needs to adapt to changing requirements and the introduction of new features. When this happens, it just might […]

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