Anthony Sciamanna

Evolutionary Design and Lightweight Architecture

Thu, 15 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Evolutionary Design is an essential practice for software organizations to deliver great software continuously, yet it is often overlooked. Software is still frequently planned and designed in large batches upfront, with complex architectures already determined, slowing delivery, increasing risk, and missing opportunities for collaboration and learning.

SPOT and Coincidental Duplication

Wed, 02 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Blog Article

My friend and colleague, Tim Ottinger and I published this blog post about SPOT and coincidental duplication. You can read it on the Industrial Logic blog here.

Conversation

Tim and I also hosted a TwitterSpace conversation on this topic which can be heard here:

Adopting a Shared Test Double Vocabulary

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When software development teams begin practicing TDD and mircotesting, they commonly adopt a mocking framework and use it everywhere. This practice can cause harm to the codebase as well as the team’s interactions. It’s easy to overlook the overuse of mocking frameworks without the experience of working with high-quality microtest suites.

Code Kata Websites

Thu, 05 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I frequently practice code katas with the development teams I coach and train. I’ve pulled this list of code kata websites out of my notes a few times in the past month, so I decided to publish this information as a listicle (list article). I’ve found code katas to be an important practice to help build new skills and establish habits. Practices like Test-Driven Development, refactoring, automated refactoring techniques, and microtesting can all be improved by practicing code katas. Now on to the list.

Code Kata Resources

Industrial Logic offers a free Code Katas album from its eLearning — Java & C#
Coding Dojo Katas
Emily Bache’s Github contains many code kata repositories in a variety of programming languages
Dave Thomas’ Code Kata site
Katalyst
Awesome Katas
Exercism.org
Kata Log
TDDBuddy
Five Legacy Code Katas
Samman Coaching’s Kata Descriptions

Code Kata Screencasts

I’ve recently done a few code kata screencasts. You can find those screencasts here on my blog.

If you have other great code kata resources, feel free share them in the comments and I’ll add them to the list!

Photo credit: Christopher Gower on Unsplash

Roman Numeral TDD Kata Screencast in Kotlin

Wed, 20 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Code katas provide an opportunity to practice our software development skills, recognize patterns, and learn how to apply techniques. In general, we professional software engineers don’t spend enough time practicing. The Roman Numeral Kata provides an opportunity to practice creating an algorithm via TDD and following some of the TDD patterns like: Identifying the Essence and Doing the Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work.

Video

Refactoring - The Gilded Rose Kata

Thu, 03 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Code katas provide an opportunity to practice our software development skills, recognize patterns, and learn how to apply techniques. In general, we professional software engineers don’t spend enough time practicing. The Gilded Rose Kata is one of my favorites. It helps build skills necessary for successful refactoring, to make small incremental changes relying on automated refactoring tools as much as possible.

Follow along as I refactor the Gilded Rose code to eliminate the code smells identified at the beginning of the screencast. My goal was to keep the screencast to an hour or less. I deferred a few design decisions and refactorings at the end. However, the most significant improvements made adding the new Conjured Inventory Item a simple, two-minute code change. The Gilded Rose Kata is an example of Kent Beck’s advice:

for each desired change, make the change easy (warning: this may be hard), then make the easy change
— Kent Beck 🌻 (@KentBeck) September 25, 2012

Video

Writing Better User Stories?

Sat, 26 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Issues with user stories are a common problem for software development organizations that adopt agile frameworks. At some point in their journey development organizations will ask, “How do we write better user stories?” Well-meaning coaches or consultants come to the rescue. Their advice usually includes adopting the Connextra user story format (also called role-feature-reason). Sometimes the advice includes standards for acceptance criteria like using the Gherkin syntax. When the goal is writing better stories the result is often a large, overly complicated template to use in Jira.

Programming By Coincidence

Wed, 17 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Pocket Developer from Pretend Store

One of my primary roles as a development coach is helping software development teams and their organizations build a culture of technical excellence (often helping them build the skills to get to Continuous Delivery). When teams begin their journey to becoming high-performing they need to shed their current habits that are obstacles to their advancement. One of the most common and problematic practices I see is called Programming by Coincidence. It is important to be able to spot this practice and help reverse its negative impact on codebases and teams.

Refactoring - The Parrot Kata

Fri, 27 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Code katas provide an opportunity to practice our software development skills, recognize patterns, and learn how to apply practices. In general, we professional software engineers don’t spend enough time practicing. Code katas are one way we can practice. The Parrot Kata is based on a code sample in Martin Fowler’s Refactoring book. It is inspired by Monty Python’s Flying Circus Dead Parrot sketch.

The Bolden Rule and Software Development Teams

Thu, 19 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

There are a handful of books that have had a significant impact on me. One book, in particular, inspired me to become a software consultant, Gerald Weinberg’s The Secrets of Consulting. If you don’t know who Weinberg is I suggest reading his Wikipedia entry as a first step. He was a well-known software consultant and author, having written over 40 books in his lifetime. His books are timeless and I find myself returning to them from time to time and getting more out of them each time I read them. As I read through The Secrets of Consulting again, I realized that we can apply his Bolden Rule to help software organizations and their leaders improve.