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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Sun, 06 Feb 2005

Three books

I'd read chunks of Michael Feathers' book, Working Effectively With Legacy Code, before publication, but it's only on the last few plane rides that I've read it straight through. It's really good: gobs of experience distilled, delivered in a consistently readable style and with an encouraging, even gentle, tone.

The Pragmatically Publishing Programmers have just come out with Mike Mason's Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion. Since CVS and I have a stormy relationship, particularly regarding deleting directories, I bought the paper+PDF version post-haste.

Rick Mugridge and Ward Cunningham's Getting Fit for Developing Software is in copyedit now. They're at a particularly difficult game: writing for both nontechnical Customers or testers and programmers, weaving themes and a common thread of examples through what is inherently a lot of not-essentially-connected subtopics, tackling both How To and Why Bother. I was pleased and honored to write the foreword. But there's more: the book brings with it Rick's Fit library, with his DoFixture that's along the lines of my StepFixture but seems to be much better (though I haven't used it yet). That and Rick's other fixtures will help Fit a lot, I think.

## Posted at 21:26 in category /misc [permalink] [top]

Notes from a business traveller

You can get an entire exit row to yourself if you travel to a Superbowl team's home city on the evening of the Superbowl.

But once you check in, those same old questions come crowding into your mind:

• What's with having no power outlets within reach of anything moveable that might need power? It was bad enough when the iron couldn't be plugged in except in the most awkward corner of the room, but it's truly annoying in this day of lounging on the bed with a low-battery laptop.

• Who exactly is it that thinks those bathtub/shower drains that you open by pulling them up and close by stepping on or near them - like, say, one might while rinsing one's hair - are a good idea? Does anyone but hotels buy them?

• And why do fitted sheets for king-size beds never fit?

## Posted at 21:25 in category /junk [permalink] [top]