Weekly Nuggets – 8/12/05-8/18/05

More tasty nuggets from the past week:

• “By this point the users will probably be fed up of trying to work around the restrictions and will start texting people from their cell phones.” (Keith Bucher – Security Focus Security Basics mailing list)
• “So the short answer is that I don’t expect to see consistent application of configurability patterns in the kind of toy and example problems that get published on web sites and blogs. Even if the author has a great deal of experiance, toy problems won’t invoke the patterns that she would automatically apply to real problems in large systems.” (John Roth – http://groups.yahoo.com/group/extremeprogramming/message/110188)
• “To take another issue that comes up frequently: data bases. Do you need them?

  The usual advice we pass out is to start out without a data base. This usually runs into the objection that since they’re going to have to have one eventually, they should start out with one. Then it gets into a “we’re older and wiser than you”, “no, you’re decrepit” shoving match. This doesn’t help.

  I find it a bit more productive to point out that you’re going to run without a data base while developing: there is no other way to run large numbers of tests in the short window available during the TDD cycle. Then when you get the program to the point where it needs one, you are _still_ going to be running without one during the TDD cycle; the presence or absense of a database becomes a configuration option.” (John Roth – http://groups.yahoo.com/group/extremeprogramming/message/110199)

• “The spirit of XP as I read it is not to do everything to the extreme, but to aim to do everything to the extreme. Being humans we suffer from human traits and this means that we will fail at doing things. But this is ok, this is why we are agile – we adapt.” (Amir Kolsky – http://groups.yahoo.com/group/extremeprogramming/message/110243)
• “Replacing an on-site customer with some use cases is about as effective as replacing a hug from your Mom with a friendly note.” (Ron Jeffries)
• “How many different frameworks do we have to learn and configure before we simply abandon the language and use something better. I’d rather just work in a more dynamic language that didn’t force me to jump out to xml every time I needed some flexibility at runtime, maybe Smalltalk or Ruby. Ruby on Rails was invented specifically as a reaction against xml config files, that should speak volumes about the distaste xml leaves many people.” (Ramon Leon – http://groups.yahoo.com/group/extremeprogramming/message/110332)
• “So my //first rule// is: consider all technical debt to be bad, and work like a beaver not to have any. This means, mostly, keeping the code squeaky clean every day.

  My experience suggests that since I’m fallible, my dedication to working like a beaver will falter, and worse yet, my brain will fail to detect something to work on in time to avoid the debt. Sometimes, duplication and other bad stuff will be in the code before I notice.

  So my //second rule// is: consider all technical debt to be bad, and if it gets in the way, fix it immediately. This means that if some crufty code is involved in a customer-scheduled story, include making the code squeaky clean as part of that story’s estimate. Don’t move beyond the code that needs to be cleaned as part of the story, but fix all the code that’s really involved.

  And my //third rule// is: never, ever, schedule work to clean up code that isn’t involved in a story. Is there bad code somewhere in the system, and it’s just ticking you off, even though there are no stories around to let us work on it? Fine. Ignore it, or let’s have a couple of us come in on Saturday, on our own time, to clean it up.” (Ron Jeffries – http://groups.yahoo.com/group/extremeprogramming/message/110298)

• An XP Team Room (http://www.scissor.com/resources/teamroom/)
• (In reply to the comment that if Ron Jeffries had to pair with someone for 3 weeks – even Catherine Zeta-Jones, one of them would kill the other): “2) If the above occurs, I’ve got $20 on Ron. He’s crafty.” (William Pietri – http://groups.yahoo.com/group/extremeprogramming/message/110325)

Have a great weekend!