Gil Broza is an amazing coach. He’s also a really terrific trainer, focused on agile engineering practices. His specialties include techniques for increasing quality and reducing time-to-market, how to be a good Agile Customer, and Pragmatic Scrum. Tomorrow at 1:30 at Agile2011, he’s turning to Refactoring Conversation Smells. In his back pocket, he’s holding a simple set of patterns and questions that will help you tackle and get your conversations unstuck.

Also in that pocket are a couple of decks of Cutter Planning Poker cards. Ask him for one!

In 2011 we will see successful mechanical refactoring across service and organizational boundaries. Regretfully it will take nine more years for this to become a common agile practice.

In a decade we will see terms of service expressed as automated tests. Service providers will occasionally revise these terms and their tests as they upgrade their services. They will NOT, however, be obligated to support an old interface indefinitely. Rather, they will be obligated to provide automated refactoring scripts that have been shown to mechanically upgrade a well-known public suite of sample applications in such a way that the new tests pass.

Careful readers will notice that I’m equating testing a service interface and testing a program that uses that interface. This unification will require a fresh approach to interface specification and test. My hope is that this comes as a Read more …

I was having coffee this morning with colleague Ken Collier and we were talking about Test-driven development (TDD) and the trials and tribulations of trying to implement TDD in a development environment. I left Ken and went out for a leisurely bike ride down from the Ponderosa pines in Flagstaff to the Scrub Oak and Juniper 1,500 feet lower and 15 miles out of town (then back up-ugh).

As I was pedaling down hill thinking back on our discussion, it occurred to me that a developer doing TDD was like a triathlete–attempting to master three different, but integrated sports (running, cycling, swimming) (testing, coding, refactoring). There are several great analogies here. Many developers who are great coders, are like excellent cyclists who can’t swim–they have great trouble competing in the TDD triathlon. If you are an expert cyclists, you have Read more …