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

Chapter 5

Design 1 – Object Calisthenics

Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.

– Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The first time I came into contact with object calisthenics was at a meetup in London with my friend Ger Mán. We were so overwhelmed that we decided not to write any tests in order to focus on understanding this concept.

Big mistake!

Without the tests for feedback, we started making small errors that accumulated into a messy code base. The next day, without the pressure of the meetup, we paired up again and calmly worked on the exercise using object calisthenics as best as we could. Finally, it started to make some sense.

When I am coaching software developers, the Object Calisthenics session is usually the first big challenge. Object calisthenics forces people to think differently about software design, not by adding anything, but by removing...