Manuel Klimek

I just finished reading Steve McConnell’s Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules. Well, many times it was not exactly “reading”, more like “page-skipping”. Obvious. Obvious. Obvious. But every time I thought I knew what was coming there was something unexpected hidden inside this big recapitulation of Fred Brook’s findings. With big hard data pictures on [...]

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I finally discovered the truth about why developers rather rewrite a 1MLOC project from scratch than trying to understand a fellow programmer’s code:
We’re all code narcissists!
And the reason for that can easily deducted in a tiny logical chain:
(The best code is easy to understand) ^ (I can understand my own code the easiest, duh!)
=> (My [...]

Joe: “Writing this test will make sure that we find bugs quicker. It will let us change the code without breaking anything and it will help us to write decoupled code.”
Jim: “Maintaining this test will be a nightmare. It is tightly coupled to the class we’re writing and we cannot change anything without changing the [...]

A week ago I held my first talk since university. It was the first talk in my life I held in English, and I was scared like hell. It felt like living through those exam days back at school all over again – just that this time I thought I’m old enough to realize that [...]

Since I got test infected I’m somehow unable to write a single line of untested code without feeling uneasy. When I just want to write a tiny script containing a few lines of code in whatever text editor is installed in a system, it seems to be a daunting task to set up a programming [...]

When I write ruby scripts I like to use a single file, containing the program and all unit tests. It took me some time to find out how to add a command line switch to my ruby scripts that makes them run in script mode with full access to the Test::Unit command line arguments, while [...]

Some time ago a a discussion in the testdrivendevelopment Yahoo-Group evolved around the concept of “testable languages”. I thought about this for a while and came up with the idea that I want to be able to have expressions as first class citizens:

assertThat { assertThat(false) } abortsWith TestFailedException

Today I played a little with OCaml, sorted [...]

“Why not write a test for this?”
“Why should I, it works…”
The idea of Test-After Development is to write a set of automated white-box tests after writing your production code. Since probably every CS student in the world has learned that unit tests are a good idea, you’d expect unit testing to be an industry state [...]

Ten years ago I had a rendezvous with a beautiful girl, and at the end of the evening I gave her a ride home. Back than I thought playing the gentleman to be posh, so I opened the door for her. She slid with one elegant movement into her seat and I paced around the [...]

Scene 1. Karl and J.B. are pairing on a small web service. Karl is just returning to the workplace with a steaming, hot cup of coffee in his hand.
Karl: ‘Let me see what you wrote just now…
usUserName = request.getParameter(”UserName”);
Um… This variable, usUserName, what does the us-prefix stand for?’
J.B.: ‘Well, that is the unescaped user [...]