Exploration Through Example

Example-driven development, Agile testing, context-driven testing, Agile programming, Ruby, and other things of interest to Brian Marick

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Tue, 04 Feb 2003

Learning from Mistakes

Pragmatic Dave Thomas has a nice little bit on how pilots learn from mistakes. They read accident reports. In our field, we should build on the bug report.

I once worked with someone who took great glee in dissecting bugs in his code. Not only would he buy lunch for anyone who found a bug, he'd write long, loving notes analyzing the bug, why he made it, etc. We need more people like him.

I note in passing that I edit the "Bug Report" column for STQE Magazine. I'm always looking for authors.

Here's an example of a kind of bug I learned about. I call it the "just what I needed (almost)" bug (PDF).

## Posted at 09:31 in category /bugs [permalink] [top]

Cooper and Beck Debate

Bret points us to an interesting debate between Alan Cooper and Kent Beck. It's clear they're coming from fundamentally different positions:

Cooper: Yeah. The instant you start coding, you set a trajectory that is substantially unchangeable. If you try, you run into all sorts of problems...

Cooper: Building software isn't like slapping a shack together; it's more like building a 50-story office building or a giant dam.

Beck: I think it's nothing like those. If you build a skyscraper 50 stories high, you can't decide at that point, oh, we need another 50 stories and go jack it all up and put in a bigger foundation.

Cooper: That's precisely my point.

Beck: But in the software world, that's daily business.

Cooper: That's pissing money away and leaving scar tissue.

Beck: No. I'm going to be the programming fairy for you, Alan. I'm going to give you a process where programming doesn't hurt like that [...]

Cooper and Beck have different worldviews. They disagree, at a fundamental level, about what kind of thing software is. That put me in mind of a position paper I wrote recently, called "Agile Methods, the Emersonian Worldview, and the Dance of Agency", that tries to characterize the agile worldview.

At the workshop, one of the attendees said that he'd described my paper to his wife, a physician, and she said something like "if he really believes that, my diagnosis would be clinical schizophrenia." I still haven't decided if I'm taking that as a compliment or an insult...

## Posted at 08:45 in category /agile [permalink] [top]