Chris Searle

In Let your examples flow, Dan North describes how “Don’t Repeat Yourself” (DRY) isn’t necessarily the most important guideline for tests. While I agree with his conclusions, I think the DRY principle is still extremely important for tests.

The TED conference has some amazing talks. If you never knew you were interested in car seats for children, classical music, or feet (yeah!), some of these talks will blow you mind. A recent video that really moved me was Benjamin Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic. His insights and inspiration is invaluable for everyone [...]

At the last meeting in Oslo Lean Meetup Geoff Watts talked about BTs transition to agility. The most memorable part to me was when BT transformed a huge, waterfall type project with a delivery schedule measured in years into an agile project. The project set out to convert all BT customers to a new network [...]

People always talk about how learning is something that happens in groups. Last week, I got reminded of the point as a task I had previously struggled with alone became trivial in a pair programming episode. The first time I tried coding “a bowling scoring program” was in 2001. I’ve practices the exercise many times later. [...]

Three years ago, I was asked by one of our teams to give advice on how they should write a parser for a structured file format. Just having read up on SAX again, I recommended that they looked into designing it as a push parser. A push parser works by the design that the parser [...]

Warning: This article requires a lot of editing love before it is very useful. It might be somewhat incoherent. Read at your own risk. ;-) Silo (software): A silo system cannot easily integrate with any other system. In software, the term “silo” is used to refer to a system that is constructed as one unit from [...]

This article is a Norwegian-language version of my article Four bold claims about SOA. Dette er et utkast til en artikkel jeg ønsker å få publisert. Jeg setter stor pris på tilbakemeldinger om uklare tanker og formuleringer. To av de vanskeligste problemene vi møter innen programvareutvikling er integrasjon og det som gjerne kalles “business-IT alignment” eller forretningsorientering, [...]

In my last article, I showed how to implement authentication with Ruby on Rails. But security is about more than simple login. For many applications, we want to grant permission to manipulate a resource to a set of users. In this article, I will guide you though adding functionality so that users can modify the [...]

In my last article, I showed how to implement authentication with Ruby on Rails. But security is about more than simple login. For many applications, we want to grant permission to manipulate a resource to a set of users. In this article, I will guide you though adding functionality so that users can modify the [...]

Three challenges for agile projects When I join projects now, I want to challenge all the stakeholders to make three commitments: Simulate production at least monthly: The software should be run in an environment that is comparable with the target production environment with loads and data variations similar to that of production. Thus, the technical stability of [...]

As my previous Norwegian language article turned out to be one of the all time top hit articles in my blog, I will continue to write a few articles in Norwegian. This one is on an idea on how to do reseach on the success of agile projects. Next week, I will return to another [...]

What is the secret to happiness? Surprisingly, this question can be answered more and more definitively. I want my work to be conductive to the happiness of myself and others, and I believe agile methods can help me do that.

Two of the hardest problems of software development are integration and what we could call business-IT alignment: The whole organization working towards the same goal. SOA claims to address both of these problems. After listening harder than I’ve ever done before to SOA evangelists, I think I understand what mechanisms SOA proposes to solve these problems. [...]

When I give talks on agile, people often ask the inevitable question: “When is Agile not appropriate?” My response is that I don’t really care what people call what they do. What I am concerned about is the quality and frequency of the feedback that informs the control and decisions regarding project management and technical [...]

This post is a Norwegian language summary of a talk I did April 14th, 2008 Jobber du smidig? Jeg jobber ikke smidig. Men jeg jobber smidigere enn jeg gjorde for tre måneder siden og enda mer smidig enn jeg jobbet for et år siden. Og om et år kommer jeg til å jobbe enda smidigere. Men Smidige [...]

In my previous articles, I have showed you how to create a simple blog application with articles, comments, rss feeds and formatting. However, as it is currently written, the application allows for anyone to create or edit an article. This is a serious security issue, and we better fix it. In this tutorial, I will show [...]

On my project, we use Maven to build our software and FitNesse to write functional specifications. However, it was obvious that FitNesse wasn’t designed by Maven-fans. When I use Maven, I already have control over my classpath, and specifying it in every FitNesse test gets to be old really fast. Why can’t I just inherit [...]

Anders Nordås wrote a blog post where he talks a little about how he uses his beautiful moleskin notebook. I will pick up his challenge and write about my favorite tool, Post It notes. As many who know me are aware, I always have a pad of Post-It notes and a pen in my left pants [...]

A number of great sins have been committed under the guise of making software more maintainable. And 60% of software cost is during maintainance, according to Robert Glass. So what goal could be more laudable to pursue? The only problem is that we call things maintainable which are not. Putting remote interfaces in your application is [...]