Articles on Process
Why Your Daily Standup Sucks (and how to fix it)
The daily standup is the “Hello World” of agile development. It’s a daily, 15-minute meeting, about the current status of a project. Each participant answers three questions: what did I do yesterday, what am I doing today, what is in my way. Sounds simple, right? However, it’s surprisingly easy to turn a standup into another …
There’s a (Vim Plugin) for That! Part I: Fuzzy Finder
One of the most popular features of TextMate and RubyMine is Command-T, the ability to jump to a file with just a couple of keystrokes. Vim lacks this feature out of the box, leaving Vim newcomers less efficient. For the casual Vim users out there, when in doubt, remember this: there is a plugin for …
Vim Text Objects: The Definitive Guide
To edit efficiently in Vim, you have to edit beyond individual characters. Instead, edit by word, sentence, and paragraph. In Vim, these higher-level contexts are called text objects. Vim provides text objects for both plaintext and common programming language constructs. You can also define new text objects using Vim script. Learning these text objects can …
Crafting Commits in Git
A commit, like a well-designed function or class, should represent a single concept. A distinct, cohesive commit is easy to understand, review, and, if necessary, revert. Git’s powerful staging area allows you to finely craft your commits. You decide which files and even which changes in a file, down to the individual line level, to …
Testing Doesn’t Scale
The Ruby community’s obsession with testing is unrivaled. Over the years, Rubyists have gone from old school TDD using test/unit, to modern BDD with RSpec and finally to comprehensive integration testing, including JavaScript support, via Cucumber. The goal was tests at all layers and to get as close as possible to simulating a real browser. …
Behavior Driven Development for node.js
On Tuesday night, the San Francisco Server Side JavaScripters had an excellent meetup hosted by the folks at CBS Interactive. I gave a short talk on using zombie.js with jasmine-node to test drive your node.js application under automation. Here is the video: Here are the slides from my presentation: http://node-bdd.heroku.com And here is the source …
Getting “Test”-y in iOS Apps: Test-Driven Development and Automated Deployment
View more presentations from rudyjahchan Recently, Jonah and I have been exploring test-driven development and automated deployment on the iOS platform. As we were both attending iOSDevCamp 2011, we decided to give a lightning talk summarizing our discoveries and to generate excitement within others in the community to start their project on the right foot …
Pragmatic JavaScript Testing with Jasmine
As more and more parts of our applications are written in JavaScript, its important to have them covered with automated tests. Fortunately, there are numerous JavaScript testing tools available. As a BDD fan, the RSpec inspired Jasmine is currently my go-to.
Virtual Environments with Vagrant
After a recent run-in with an irate local sysadmin, I was convinced to try out developing on a virtual machine. His argument was that developing on one platform, such as OS X, when you are deploying to another, such as Linux, was just asking for trouble. Specifically he was referring to using Ruby gems with …
Organizing User Stories and Code by Activity
Recently I was introduced to a tool developed by my co-workers called Story Mapper. Story Mapper was inspired by an agile design technique outlined in this post; it involves a way of organizing user stories around activities. During the story writing process each story is given an activity such as “registering” or “administrating” so instead …