Are you not convinced that TDD fits your needs? Do you think that people tend to oversell it? Maybe it is not for you. The four realms of TDD It is well known that TDD is a controversial topic. On the one hand, you can find people that talk about TDD like the cure for…

TDD is counterintuitive, and because of it, it is undoubtedly one of the toughest concepts to learn in programming. — The conception of TDD is, in the lack of a better word, strange. When Kent Beck explains how he invented TDD, he claims: «If an idea is good, and turn out to be true, somebody else will have done it; but, if an idea is stupid, you have a chance…

The popular saying is Measure Twice, Cut Once, but it does not apply to the Software Development industry. — Often in engineering, “Measure Twice, Cut One” is a dogma. It does also mean plan carefully before execute. It is reasonable, making a mistake is expensive, so we better plan before. But we cannot apply it everywhere, for every task. Do you have ever realized how slow we would be…

Recently, I published an article that turns upside down a very difficult concept into one easy to understand. The first time that I did that, I got hooked on teaching. It was the year 2000. I was finishing my degree in Computer Engineering, and a fellow student of mine asked…

After years of teaching, I found that the inversion concept is very difficult to grasp. Recently, I found a new technique to explain it, that works very well, and that is the one that I use here. — It seems strange because it says inversion, which seems that something is upside-down. Somehow it is true, but what we turn is something that should be reversed innately. Un-inverted dependencies To understand correctly what means an inverted dependency, or inverted control, we need to understand first what we mean when it is…

During a few days, I have seen, and evaluated, lots of different Agile practices. Here are the results, and how people fail Agile by overthinking features, under-observing outcomes, and limiting its iterations to just code. — During this week, I have been a member of several tribunals evaluating final degree projects of software engineering. For my surprise, many of them were still doing Waterfall, but even some of those who claimed to follow Agile practices, did not iterate even once.

There are countless interpretations about Agile, but one concept is the essence. — I write this article because I have seen, and also suffered, a lot of confusion about Agile. There are several practices and several flavors, and some may seem more or less Agile. If we also consider the expressions like Mini-Waterfall or Water-Scrum-Fall, it is hard to assess what is Agile…