When you like something, whatever it could be, it’s easier and natural for everyone to point out the beauty as well as the pros and the benefits. Cons, issues and pains are often left behind. But in some cases (or maybe always, who knows..) such an information is not enough to have a clear 360° view on the thing. It’s always the same old story, what may be good for you may not be as good for me.

As everything else in this world, TDD has not only pros and benefits. But googling around it’s easier to find most of all enthusiatic thoughts on it. Well, by chance I found someone using it and giving a clear and objective criticism towards TDD. What I really like is that this criticism is not an end in itself, but wants to help people to figure out what does using TDD means and to understand if it is the right choice or not.

Have a nice read: Test driven development at Transloadit.

While reading what’s new on the #Agile Daily from paper.li, I found this funny video talking about Agile and based on Imagine (yes, the one from John Lennon).

Imagine Agile by @oclaudiobr and Gustavo Sato (Japa)

At first it’s a little bit stupid, but..in the end it makes some fun. And here are the lyrics:

“Imagine there´s no Gantt charts
It’s easy if you try
No “resources” bellow us
Above us only ROI
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there’s no requests for change
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no silver bullets too
Imagine all the people
Sharing tasks in peace

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And our kanban will guide the flow

Imagine real commitment
I wonder if you can
No need for fear or blood pacts
We’ll deliver what we really can
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the code

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And our kanban will guide the flow”

Thx to @oclaudiobr who doesn’t really seem to have better things to do!

Playing real test-driven development the right way may not be so easy as it seems and seeing a master doing it with your own eyes may be very helpful. Thankfully there’s somebody out there that is so unselfish to help us playing this game. James Shore published in his blog a very good set of lessons (43 by now, and counting…) on TDD called “Let’s play TDD“.

Actually Shore is not alone and if you google a little bit you will find a lot of interesting videos talking about TDD. Even Kent Beck published his own TDD lessons on the Pragmatic bookshelf. But you’ll  need some money to get it…while Shore’s lessons are totally free . Hope this helps.

Well, I’m not an experienced developer nor a well shaped professional. Anyway, in my little experience, I’ve had the chance to discover how much important could be a true, experienced and offish advice in everyday work. In particular I’ve had the chance to get those advices from colleagues, friends. Unfortunately most of the times you have to rely on yourself only, so no way to get a slap on your back right when you need it. But hey, you are old enough to find some help in another way. For example by paying…for a good book! If you are strong enough to live without getting some slaps on your back, of course..

After a year and a half I realized I was wondering in the dark, every day: my work as developer was totally out of control, code I was writing was really far from being a good one and I felt lost as I didn’t know how to improve. Then a slap on my back came from a good friend of mine. He gave me a good advice: to buy a simple, thin book titled “Practices of an Agile Developer” written by a certain A. Hunt. In the meantime I was starting reading yet another strange book titled “Extreme programming explained”. I think that just a little bunch of you out there read it at least once in your life. Anyway, as I trust in my friend’s advices, and most of all I like to test whether they were right or not, I started reading this new book. And soon I proved that advice was really a good one.

Again, I’m not an experienced reviewer. Well, I’m not a reviewer at all. But at least this time I think I can give you a good advice: Practices of an Agile Developer is really a good book. Not a wonderful book, not the best book in the world, but a book that is worth paying for. One reason for all: it gives you what it promises (whether the title of a book is a promise, of course). As a matter of fact, as the title states, it is very practical, always agile and really developer oriented. In each part of it. So please, do not expect some kind of “philosophical sugar” as you won’t get any out of it.

The book is composed by 10 chapters, split in short, incredibly clear and very focused sections. The most interesting thing about it, at least the one I liked most, is that every single section is an advice. Thanks god, this book is a big bunch of advices ready to be digested!! A full set of experienced friendly passionate advices that can immediately change your everyday life as (un)experienced developer. Furthermore, another thing I really loved, is that I found many little pieces of my everyday working life spread more or less in every section of this book. This was very surprising to me as I finally realized it: this book is not made of oddities, this book is not fiction, this book comes from real life and helps me dealing with real life.  As the back cover states “you could learn all this stuff the hard (…) way, by trial and error, but this book can save you both time and pain. Read it, and you’ll be a better developer.”. Yet another good advice!