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As we begin this episode, I’ve just created a fresh repository, and I’m ready to start developing my Towers game.
The Walking Skeleton
I pick what I think will be a good “walking skeleton” feature, a feature chosen specifically to quickly conju…

Towers. Last year I developed Towers [PDF], a rectangular version of Kris Burm’s hexagonal game Dvonn. Now, Burm is a genius, and Dvonn is a fascinating game just the way it is, and the world doesn’t really need a watered-down rectangular version o…

In my previous post, I described how to write JUnit rules. In this post, I’ll describe some of the things rules are good for, with examples.
Before JUnit runs a test, it knows something about the test. When the test ends, JUnit knows something about …

JUnit rules allows you to write code to inspect a test before it is run, modify whether and how to run the test, and inspect and modify test results. I’ve used rules for several purposes:

Before running a test, send the name of the test to Sauce Lab…

At the end of a workshop in 1997, I offered a clichéd end-of-training activity: “How will you use what you’ve learned in this workshop? Write that down.” A few people started to write. More people looked uncomfortable. More than half seemed to c…

The demand for certifications comes ultimately from hirers—in particular, from hirers who need to hire and retain highly skilled practitioners, and who are not themselves able to assess practitioners’ skills. Though certification programs may serve…

One of the most powerful things you can do to help someone solve a problem is to ask great questions. My new article “Questions to Explore Problems” (PDF) gives dozens of questions that I’ve found essential in my work as a coach, including questi…

In a fascinating TED Talk, Laurie Santos shows that monkeys make the same kinds of economic errors as humans do. Another way to say this: Humans make some of the same kinds of economic errors as monkeys do.
Early in the video, Santos asked a question t…

A few weeks ago, at Agile Development Practices West 2010 conference in Las Vegas, my friend and colleague Bob Payne hosted me for an episode of his Agile Toolkit podcast. I invite you to listen to our half-hour conversation and to other episodes about…