Agile Otter Blog

I'm working with Industrial Logic's newest Python album on microtesting (not yet released) and was lucky enough to get to test out the automated critique. So the way this eLearning works is that you download a problem to work on, and you're given tasks to perform. In this case, it's all about writing microtests for some simple python code. When you finish, you upload your results and an automated critique system digs through the code and gives you ratings and pointers. This is rather like having a mentor sitting with you, reviewing the code. I tell people that the eLearning here is something like they've never seen, but people think I'm marketing or something. Today I have a story for you: Yesterday I made a mistake and the automated critique busted me. The mistake was one where I constructed an object incorrectly and invalidated the premise of the test, yet I did this in such a way that the test passed for the wrong reason. I was feeling so sure I'd...

This first appeared on the Object Mentor blog in 2007, but I had to get a cached copy from google to reread it. I'm reviving it here so we don't lose it forever. I think it is still carries a valid point, and I would like to revisit it in the near future. Short Reach Posted by tottinger on Monday, April 23, 2007 I’m always trying to find newer, better, shorter, more powerful ways to explain what Agile is about. I suppose I’m some kind of obsessive about expressive power and economy. Finally I decided that Agile, as I understand it today, is about the short reach. It seems to me that all of the agile practices are about shortening our reach, the distance in time-and-space that one leaves an assumption, decision, or line of code untested and unconfirmed. All the practices seem to follow this one rule. The customer/analyst is kept in the same room, in the same short reach.  We feed back the iterations to the customer/analyst so that his every decision has a shorte...