Book Image

Agile Technical Practices Distilled

By : Pedro M. Santos, Marco Consolaro, Alessandro Di Gioia
Book Image

Agile Technical Practices Distilled

By: Pedro M. Santos, Marco Consolaro, Alessandro Di Gioia

Overview of this book

The number of popular technical practices has grown exponentially in the last few years. Learning the common fundamental software development practices can help you become a better programmer. This book uses the term Agile as a wide umbrella and covers Agile principles and practices, as well as most methodologies associated with it. You’ll begin by discovering how driver-navigator, chess clock, and other techniques used in the pair programming approach introduce discipline while writing code. You’ll then learn to safely change the design of your code using refactoring. While learning these techniques, you’ll also explore various best practices to write efficient tests. The concluding chapters of the book delve deep into the SOLID principles - the five design principles that you can use to make your software more understandable, flexible and maintainable. By the end of the book, you will have discovered new ideas for improving your software design skills, the relationship within your team, and the way your business works.
Table of Contents (31 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1
7
Section 2
13
Section 3
19
Section 4
25
Chapter 21
28
License: CyberDojo

Boundaries

There are several opinions about the correct boundaries for acceptance tests that can have a big impact in how fast they execute. While it is true that a proof of a working system is achievable only by running tests on the real infrastructure, we find that the cost for the slower tests' execution is too high for the value provided. It isn't uncommon to see developers avoid running the tests when they are too slow, which would provide feedback too late and make them ineffective.

At the end of the day, in terms of acceptance, we are interested in proving the business behavior. And if we design our system well, that kind of abstraction lives in a very specific layer of our system, as we have seen in the previous lesson. Hence, it's a perfectly acceptable trade-off to run our acceptance suite, skipping infrastructural delivery components and hitting the application layer.

If we correctly separate UI concerns and business concerns, for example, by using the...