Kerry Buckley What’s the simplest thing that could possibly go wrong?

11 March 2007

DRYing out model specs

Filed under: Agile,Rails,Ruby — Kerry Buckley @ 9:10 pm

[Updated 14/3/07: corrected specify_attributes as per Paul’s comment]
[Updated 18/12/07: modified to avoid crazy RSpec errors]

A week or so ago I wrote about writing specs for simple pieces of functionality (particularly those that are arguably just configuration, like Rails validations). I argued that it’s important to test-drive even the simple things – however, the amount of test code can get out of hand.

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1 March 2007

Testing trivialities … and double-entry bookkeeping

Filed under: Agile,Ruby,Software — Kerry Buckley @ 9:04 am

From time to time I end up in a discussion (as often as not with myself) about the point at which something is so trivial that it doesn’t justify creating a unit test (or behaviour spec, in more BDD-like language).

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22 February 2007

InfoQ interview Mary and Tom Poppendieck about Lean

Filed under: Agile,General nonsense — Kerry Buckley @ 11:06 am

See the video here.

I’ll get round to watching the whole thing eventually, but first, use the link underneath the video to skip to “What are some of the other principles of Lean?”

I never realised that Tom Poppendieck was such an accomplished ventriloquist!

21 February 2007

Out of step

Filed under: General nonsense,Software — Kerry Buckley @ 10:10 pm

More proof, as if it were needed, that I’m not up-to-date with the latest fashions.

Just as I’m teetering on the brink of switching from Safari to Firefox at home (mainly for all that plugin goodness), I read that Firefox’s market share is down, and Safari’s is up.

[tags]firefox, safari, browser wars[/tags]

18 February 2007

BT’s Java SDK part two: making phone calls

Filed under: BT,Java,Web21C — Kerry Buckley @ 12:02 pm

Yesterday we saw how easy it is to send text messages using the SDK, so now let’s try making a phone call.

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17 February 2007

BT’s Java SDK

Filed under: BT,Java,Web21C — Kerry Buckley @ 5:01 pm

As I mentioned recently, I now work in the Web21C SDK team. The SDK provides a simple API for programmatically accessing various web services that BT provides, including SMS, conference calls and location services.

The SDK is in public beta, and is currently free (with daily usage limits). Up to now it’s only been available for those crazy .NET folks, but the next release (on Monday, all being well) will extend that to Java, PHP and Python. Rumour has it that Ruby’s in the works too.

I’ve been having a play with the Java version – here’s a sneak preview…

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Cultural blocks to adoption of agile development

Filed under: Agile,Enterprise — Kerry Buckley @ 4:15 pm

A recent article in the New York Times describes the issues of introducing ‘The Toyota Way’ to non-Japanese factories.

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27 January 2007

The other kind of SOA (reprise)

Filed under: Software — Kerry Buckley @ 8:36 pm

Jason Kolb has an insightful post today on the same kind of issue that I was talking about in the other kind of SOA.

25 January 2007

Fighting Developer Abuse

Filed under: Agile — Kerry Buckley @ 3:53 pm

This ThoughtWorks recruitment ad is pure genius.

17 January 2007

I guess we’re now a cool international telco

Filed under: Agile,BT — Kerry Buckley @ 9:23 am

Overheard last night at XtC:

“I work for Dresdner.”

“Ah, they used to be a cool international investment bank.”

“What are we now then?”

“An international investment bank.”

“Why aren’t we cool any more?”

“Because you lost JP.”

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