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, 07 Jun 2005

My niche as an editor

I'm dialing down my work on Better Software magazine to one article an issue. I'll concentrate on helping early-adopter authors bring now-safe techniques to the early mainstream. Not entirely coincidentally, these are the articles that I pull out of my back pocket for clients. "You need an X, and here's an article about it."

Here are some examples:

• Jeffrey Fredrick's article on continuous integration. It's hard to think of a reason not to have a build machine running CruiseControl or some similar tool. And yet people hire me who don't know how straightforward it now is.

• J.B. Rainsberger's article on dependency injection explains an increasingly common technique that for some reason is shrouded in obscure jargon. J.B.'s article is an exception (as is this by Martin Fowler).

• Jonathan Bach's article on session-based exploratory testing, which introduced the important idea of charters and talks about how to make exploratory testing fit into a management framework. (See also this.)

There are other examples, but those are ones that came to mind both because of recent experience and because I didn't have to search for links. In upcoming issues, I'll have articles on using examples (Fit tests) for specification, what it's like to be an XP customer, and building a strangler application.

If you have ideas for an article that matches this theme, send me a proposal. Forgive tardy replies: I'm digging myself out of a pile of urgency.

## Posted at 09:10 in category /misc [permalink] [top]