Comments for The thinking box

Comment on Our opposable thumb makes us all professional mechanics, doesn’t it?!? by xpmatteo

xpmatteo — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 09:42:15 +0000

I think this state of affairs is because of the length of the feedback loop. It may take years between doing a sloppy programming work and becoming aware of the damage. There are many ways to pretend you’re on top of a programming job when in fact you’re performing poorly.

I think the power of XP and Agile is in letting problems bubble up sooner rather than later. This, unfortunately, can be detrimental to the good programmers in the short term!

Comment on Our opposable thumb makes us all professional mechanics, doesn’t it?!? by uberVU - social comments

uberVU - social comments — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 07:36:34 +0000

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Comment on Our opposable thumb makes us all professional mechanics, doesn’t it?!? by Luca Minudel

Luca Minudel — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:17:45 +0000

> So, it still seems kind of dumb to resolve to hire mediocre people,
> especially when you are a medium-large company: you certainly have
> bigger capacity to absorb inefficiencies, but those numbers are starting
> to be so big, that unbelievable amounts of money go down the drain just
> because of this. Having said that, there are not nearly enough good
> programmers in the world and it seems that HR and head hunters have
> just given up.

I’m thinking for a while about self-reproductive teams: team build with all top programmers, that reach the hyper-performance level and then can absorb junior/intermediate devs and take them up to spedd quickly. Or plit start new teams in the company with the same process/practices/hyper-productive state

Comment on Big in Japan by PierG

PierG — Mon, 18 May 2009 14:27:10 +0000

Thank you for sharing!!!
PierG
http://pierg.wordpress.com

Comment on Big in Japan by Marco Abis

Marco Abis — Mon, 18 May 2009 12:33:35 +0000

Richard is great and I love his non-IT background and experience

Comment on If it’s for test then it has to be good by jacopo

jacopo — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 10:39:37 +0000

it just happened to me a few weeks ago, while pairing with a team-mate. we were moving away ConnectionExceptions from a lot of clients into the Connector itself, letting it managing connection in a lazy fashion.

no way to let a green bar appear on our unit tests, connection was never closed, alway a null refernce. 20 mins later we found our lazy init was “if connection != null set connection”.. instead of == null !!

when i faced DbC for the first time, i thought unit tests were the only valid alternative to code assertion and (obviously!) to documentation. i also find myself writing test for test code when in trouble:

http://jfranzoi.wordpress.com/2008/11/05/not-sure-write-a-test/

for annotation, maibe next generations of VMs will go this way..

bye!

Comment on Using functors to handle test connections by thinkingbox

thinkingbox — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:27:37 +0000

Luca,

The tests that I’m dealing with are either HttpUnit tests that run in process with ServletUnit or various kind of unit tests which use a mock db driver instead of interfacing with the DB directly.

We were able to migrate most of the tests to use their own connection, instead of hijacking the one used by the code running with the servlets. In a small number of cases though, the functor described above, that basically hijacks the connection being used by the servlet infrastructure, has been an effective way to simplify the tests.

Comment on Using functors to handle test connections by Luca Minudel

Luca Minudel — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 14:43:04 +0000

I’ve tests like this in the code base I work with

> tests can be provided with their own connection that has nothing to deal with the connection …
I don’t understood this point, can you explain a bit more ?

Agree about Functor, in C# with generics I can do something equivalent so I can re-use this idea

my feedback about this:
> tests that follow the above structure inherit from an abstract TestCase

I’ve found hard to read the test code other then mine of tests case that inherits from a test base class (you point out an abstract – so this is not the case) – now I use composition and avoid inheritance for the tests classes

Comment on Using functors to handle test connections by thinkingbox

thinkingbox — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 03:40:55 +0000

Porter,

Yes, I concur, Commons Functor would be interesting, but I’m not sure about its status. Let’s hope for the better.

Comment on Using functors to handle test connections by Porter

Porter — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 13:26:39 +0000

Consider the Functor from the Commons…

I’ve never been quite certain why it never really went anywhere – it’s been stuck in the Sandbox forever.

http://commons.apache.org/sandbox/functor/