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Monthly Archives: September 2008

I (heart) my tests

(This isn’t for you. This is a love letter to my unit tests, who deserve it, who deserve a 5 am stream of consciousness homage.) Slow builds really bug me. And having lots of unit tests is no excuse for a slow build. If you think they are, there’s something you’re not doing right. This past week […]

SDBP ’08, Habitable Code and Early Registration

I’m going to be talking at this year’s Software Development Best Practices in Boston with Paul Julius. Our talk is Creating Habitable Code, and we’ll be drawing on our experience with CruiseControl as our central example. My interest in topics like continuous integration, developer testing and mundane excellence have the common thread of “how do we […]

Making software like intensive care or bombing missions

Today Ben Simo twittered a link to Cem Kaner‘s keynote slides from CAST 2008 on The Value of Checklists and the Danger of Scripts. This was timely for me because I’d been trying to describe to a friend about why I thought manually executed scripts are worse than useless. Even better, at least for general inspiration, Kaner’s slides […]