Book Image

Agile Technical Practices Distilled

By : Santos, Consolaro, Di Gioia
Book Image

Agile Technical Practices Distilled

By: Santos, Consolaro, 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

Refactoring Guidelines

Stay in the Green While Refactoring

Tests should test behavior, so there is no reason why we should break any tests during refactoring. If you break any tests while refactoring, undo, go back to green, and start over.

Don't change production code that is not covered by tests. If we need to refactor some code that has no tests, then start by adding behavior tests. We will cover this point in more detail in the next lesson, which deals with legacy code.

It may be that we have tests, but they are coupled with the implementation in a way that it is not possible to change the implementation without breaking the tests. In this case, we start refactoring by the tests, and once we have tests that are not coupled with the implementation, we can start refactoring the implementation.

Use IDE-automated refactoring to minimize text editing and risk—provided you trust your IDE automated refactors. Most IDEs try to keep your code compiling, and if they...