Exploring Extreme Programming
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson. 2020. The premise of this book is that America has a literal caste system, in the same sense as India or Nazi Germany have had. The system sorts people by attributes Continue reading Review – Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Many user stories fit the model of trigger and response: the user does something, the system responds. For example, if you type a letter, the word processor inserts it; if you press the “Buy” button, the system processes your order. Continue reading Is Trigger vs Response a Good Story Split?
“If” statements often attract complexity. They gather compound conditions that are hard to understand. More “if” statements get nested inside. It gets hard to know under what conditions any bit of code will run. “Duplicate and Customize” is a refactoring Continue reading Refactor: Duplicate and Customize
I’ve been involved with several projects over the last few months, and each has user stories associated with it. People often ask for examples of user stories, so I thought I’d share these. The Form By default, I use the Continue reading Examples of User Stories 2020
When a “raw” type appears in a protocol, it encourages it to spread all over. Recently, I needed to encapsulate a type: I had used “array of integer” ([Int]) in a number of places, and I wanted to change this Continue reading Refactor: Change Signature on a Protocol [Interface]
For most problems, we have a choice: implement current needs only, or generalize the solution to more easily handle variations we expect to need in the future. The evolutionary design community refers to the latter approach as speculative generality, and Continue reading Speculative Generality
In building a cache for the SortTables™ data viewer, I ran across three hidden things. An LRU Cache I want to view data sets that are larger than memory, so I developed a cache that gets rid of the Least Continue reading Programming: Using What’s Hidden
TDD with a user interface (UI) is a challenge: you have to decide which parts to test. Recently, Ted Young has been using the Yacht dice game (the root of the commercial game Yahtzee) as a testbed for TDD with Continue reading TDD & GUI in Swift
“Sufficient Completeness” is a characteristic of specifications, from the theory of abstract data types. It can help guide our testing. One way of looking at objects is to consider the history of what has happened to them: the sequence of Continue reading Sufficient Completeness and TDD
Japanese Inn. By Oliver Statler. This book tells the story of Minaguchi-ya, a (real) inn on the road between Kyoto and Tokyo, the old capital and the new. It ranges from 1569 to the 1950s. Each chapter tells about the Continue reading Review: Japanese Inn