The way of the unusual architect - Dan North

An enlightening talk on 'how the human mind works and its corollaries on how programmers work' from the wise Dan North - founder-leader of the BDD camp..

...and so you go from something that was fit for purpose but a little bit ugly to something that never quite delivers. Who here has been involved in what I call a 2-year rewrite anti-pattern ? So we go to the business and we say

Ok.We will rewrite out entire system for some period of 2 years and then everything will be good.
'Wait hang on. What will we get after 2 years?'
Exactly what you've got now.
'Right... and during that 2 years..'
Oh we're locked down! We can't do anything else for you.
'Ok. So you're telling us that we should pay you for 2 years to go no further than we are now and you won't be able to do anything else'.
No.. that's pretty much it.
'Okay...'

and we call that enterprise architecture.

He had me there 3 mins into the talk. Recommended

Beacons - a VS 2010 Extension for TDD

Just uploaded an early version of a TDD visualization extension that I've been working on in my free time. Get an early version of Beacons from the google code project here

The extension only works with NUnit currently. You specify a file path to your NUnit test results file path (which is normally a TestResults.xml file in your .dll/.nunit folder) and you're all set to go.
It can't listen to Resharper test-runner yet. (yet.. if I can figure out how to tap in, should be not an issue.)

To see it in action, check out this video - switch to fullscreen HD


TDD StringCalculator Kata - Part1 from Gishu Pillai on Vimeo.

• Shift+Alt+B, H - Change hats (adding behavior hat OR refactoring hat)
• Shift+Alt+B, P - Play/Pause (when you need to take a break)

If you give it a fair try, I'd love to hear from you. Particularly I'm interested in finding patterns (so share end-of-session screenshots)
More ideas, comments, suggestions - feedback of any kind is welcome.. Post away at http://groups.google.com/group/beacons-tdd