Core Skills

Contract Tests

February 1, 2023

One of my favorite awesome talks of all time is Integrated Tests Are a Scam by J.B. Rainsberger. I must admit that the title has a clickbait vibe to it. However, I very muc...

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The Testing Quadrant

June 15, 2022

Back in 2003, Brian Marick wrote an excellent article series about agile testing. There he described the concept of the Testing Quadrant. To my recollection this used to be a ...

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Ignoring Tests

June 22, 2021

Most test frameworks out there have the capability to disable tests. This is usually done by adding some kind of annotation that instructs the test runner to ignore an individu...

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Inside-Out and Outside-In TDD

June 16, 2020

Test-Driven Development is a discipline that exists for about two decades now. Unfortunately, to this very day, it is still not without controversy. Most professional developer...

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Test Double Heuristics

June 3, 2020

In the previous blog post, we’ve talked about avoiding excessive specification of test doubles. This is just one in a series of “good practices” for using test doubles in solit...

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Test Doubles

April 8, 2020

In the previous blog post, we’ve talked about indirect inputs and outputs when a unit test exercises a Subject Under Test. The examples shown previously demonstrate the use of ...

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Indirect Inputs and Outputs

April 1, 2020

Previously we discussed what state and behaviour verification is about. Depending on the nature of the production code that we’re designing, we might decide to apply one approa...

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Cascading Failures

March 18, 2020

In a previous blog post, we discussed the test pyramid and why it is a useful model to reason about a healthy mix of solitary and sociable tests. I mentioned that at t...

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The Test Pyramid

November 7, 2019

In the previous blog post, we touched on two different categories of automated tests, namely solitary and sociable tests. We also mentioned that in order to build maintainable ...

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A Taxonomy Of Tests

October 8, 2019

It’s more than fair to say that the terminology used in the world of automated tests can be a bit overwhelming. Software people have uncovered all sorts of tests in a wide vari...

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Fast Feedback

September 3, 2019

Test-Driven Development is a discipline that exists for almost two decades now. Unfortunately, to this very day, it is still not without controversy. Most professional developer...

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Debugability Considered Useful

January 3, 2019

Developers are lazy. There’s nothing new about that. We even pride ourselves on it. Sometimes being lazy is a good thing, but most of the time it’s not something we should brag ...

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Blaming Mocks For Bad Design

December 18, 2018

A while back I stumbled upon this talk titled Built-in Fake Objects. After I’ve watched the first 20 minutes or so, I was so worked up that I almost threw away my iPad just out ...

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How Do I Learn

March 7, 2009

You may have noticed that I didn't get around to write that many blog posts over the last two months. While some of you may regret this, others would argue that the universe has...

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Marick's Law

November 29, 2008

This delightful post from Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin describes with much better sentences what I was trying to express with my latest post Professional Under Pressure. When ...

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Professional Under Pressure

November 27, 2008

A first delivery of our current project is going into production very soon. The team has worked hard and is still working very hard to straighten out the last issues. As with ev...

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Little Secret

September 24, 2008

I'll let you in on a little secret. The key to writing good comments is ... (rolling the drums) ... not writing them at all! Let me elaborate on that. To me, there are two kinds...

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The Onion Architecture

July 29, 2008

This is what I consider to be a good architecture for long-lived business applications and how I like to design them. Actually, our current and past two projects apply this desi...

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From Space Shuttle to Software

February 21, 2008

This article, Richard Feynman, the Challenger Disaster, and Software Engineering, really struck a nerve. It's very well written and well thought out. I'll jump right to the conc...

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A day of great quotes

September 10, 2007

Scott Bellware: I think that the difference between a good developer and an excellent developer is the excellent developer's willingness to not know, an openness to explore, and...

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Discipline

August 15, 2007

Another must-read post by Jeff Atwood on how Discipline Makes Strong Developers. I couldn't agree more. Only discipline on the part of the developers makes code that is concise ...

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ALT.NET - Summary

June 5, 2007

Great summary on being ALT.NET. I don't completely agree with the hot-or-not list of Roy, therefore I like the modified list of Sam much more. My goal in life is to be ALT.NET a...

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Agile is just human nature

May 12, 2007

I just finished reading a book written by Phillip Khan-Panni, and its not about any of the latest cool technologies or methodologies, but about efficient communication between u...

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ALT.NET

May 4, 2007

After reading this post from David Laribee, I promptly put the four criteria to be an ALT.NET developer on our team portal. 1/ You’re the type of developer who uses what work...

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Build a solid core

April 8, 2007

Essential reading from Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo about building a solid core. This post contains a number of truths that I want to point out. Many developers need to spend more time...

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A lean mean blogging machine

March 6, 2007

I'm convinced that this guy does not sleep at night (or his time management must be awesome). He does so many blog posts a day, he must be a cyborg of some sort ;-) or is he a t...

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Maintainable code

January 26, 2007

A very nice post by Uncle Bob about rapid software development. We've all done it! Pulling together those quick & dirty hacks in order to meet our deadline. We've created so...

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About

Thank you for visiting my website. I’m a professional software developer since Y2K. A blogger since Y2K+5. Author of Writing Maintainable Unit Tests. Provider of training and coaching in XP practices. Curator of the Awesome Talks list. Thinking and learning about all kinds of technologies since forever.

Contact information

(+32) 496 38 00 82

infonull@nullprincipal-itnull.be