Author Archives: davef

Pair Programming for Introverts

Posted on November 22, 2018 by davef

A friend of mine has recently started work at a new company. She asked me if I’d answer a few questions from their dev team, so here is the first in a short series of their questions and my answers… … Continue reading →

Posted in Agile Development, Culture, Effective Practices, Pair Programming | 1 Comment

CI and the Change Log

Posted on September 11, 2018 by davef

I get in to debates about the relative merits of “Continuous Integration (and Delivery)” vs those of “Feature Branching”  on a fairly regular basis. A common push-back against CI, from the feature-branchers, is “you can’t maintain a clean change-log”. I … Continue reading →

Posted in Agile Development, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Integration, Effective Practices, Feature Branching | 4 Comments

Three Distinct Mind-sets in TDD

Posted on June 27, 2018 by davef

I have blogged about TDD before. I think that it is one of the most important tools in improving the design of our software, as well as increasing the quality of the systems that we create. TDD provides valuable, fine-grained … Continue reading →

Posted in Continuous Integration, Effective Practices, Software Design, TDD | 10 Comments

A Few Thoughts on Feature Flags

Posted on April 9, 2018 by davef

I confess that “Feature Flags” make me a bit nervous. Despite this I think them a useful and important tool in our ability to achieve Continuous Integration. So why do they make me nervous? Well, they are a form of … Continue reading →

Posted in Agile Development, Continuous Integration, Effective Practices | 6 Comments

Continuous Integration and Feature Branching

Posted on March 30, 2018 by davef

Recently I spoke at the Pipeline Conference in London. I gave a talk on “Optimising Continuous Delivery” to a bunch of people who were self-selected as interested in Continuous Delivery, most of them would already consider themselves CD practitioners, Pipeline … Continue reading →

Posted in Agile Development, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Integration, Effective Practices, Feature Branching | 74 Comments

Answers to GOTO Cph 2017 Questions

Posted on October 2, 2017 by davef

I gave a presentation on my recommended approach to Acceptance Testing today, here at GOTO Copenhagen. You can see an earlier version of this talk, from another conference here. GOTO will be publishing their version soon 😉 I ran out … Continue reading →

Posted in Acceptance Testing, Agile Development, Continuous Delivery, TDD | Leave a comment

Confessions of someone who should know better

Posted on January 24, 2017 by davef

Ever had that sickening feeling that you have lost some important data? I have been travelling a lot lately and arrived home to find that my personal blog site, this site, was down. I host this site via a hosting … Continue reading →

Posted in Blog Housekeeping | 2 Comments

Diversity

Posted on January 24, 2017 by davef

I inadvertently found myself in the middle of a minor Twitter storm on the topic of diversity. The organisers of a conference that I attended made some, to me, intemperate remarks on the subject. They were asked why there were … Continue reading →

Posted in Culture | Leave a comment

Mob Rule?

Posted on October 7, 2016 by davef

I was at a conference last year where I saw Woody Zuill talking about “Mob Programming”. You can see that talk here A very simple description of Mob programming, for those of you who don’t have time to watch Woody’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Agile Development, Culture, Effective Practices | Leave a comment

Test *Driven* Development

Posted on June 29, 2016 by davef

Before Test Driven Development (TDD) the only thing that applied a pressure for high-quality in software development was the knowledge, experience and commitment of an individual software developer. After TDD there was something else. High quality in software is widely … Continue reading →

Posted in Agile Development, Continuous Delivery, Effective Practices, Software Design, TDD | 2 Comments