Next year, I will co-host a conference about IT management. You should really check it out, it will be fun:

www.advanceit.io

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In the last week or so, I was playing a little bit with microservices (hey! a buzzword!), and I used Spring Boot to create those services. On of my first questions was: How can I test a set of services from a business point of view with a single click in my IDE - I.e. how can I ensure that the complete application has the right features? I wanted a way to start multiple Spring Boot web applications in the same JVM. Here is how I did it.

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Do you write //FIXME or //TODO comments? I surely do. At least I did- I am trying to get rid of them right now. I am trying to get rid of them by replacing them with a failing unit test - A test that is ignored. Now I want to tell you how and why I do it.

A couple of weeks ago, I bought a new laptop. And with it, I switched completely back to Linux (Fedora Workstation 21). Ok, I have windows installed in VMWare so I can run the two or three programs that absolutely need Windows. But I do all of my normal work in Linux now.

I have created two new Blogs. Yes, you read that right, “Blogs”, not “Blog Posts” :) The reason for me was that the content here on this site was very diverse, and I wanted some more focused sites. You will, from now on, find the following content on my blogs:

Note: This is a really simple example. But I’m quite confident that this could work on bigger problems / projects too.

On the train home from SoCraTes 2014, I was discussing with Johannes Link if REPL driven development could give us the same advantages we get from Test Driven Development (TDD).

We agreed that TDD gives us at least these three advantages:

• Fast Feedback: With a good unit test suite, you quickly get feedback about what is going on in your code base. Especially with a plugin like Infinitest
• Small, safe steps: By writing the tests first, you automatically validate every step. By writing good tests, you force yourself to take small steps.
• The tests: They are a living documentation of our thinking process and a regression suite for our code base.

That a REPL gives you fast feedback is obvious. But what about the other two?

A few days ago, I have completely re-written the front page of my homepage. I think now it better shows what I have to offer and how I can help teams and software organizations. I would be really interested in your feedback: What do you like about it? What do you dislike? Have you any suggestions what I could do better? Please email me and let me know: Business@DavidTanzer.net.

In a recent discussion about whether Agile is dead or not, I read an interesting comment:

I've seen this cycle a few times. Let me handwave how it goes:

• Agile Critisism: The snake oil is all over and getting worse!
• Agilista: It's not done properly!
• Agile Criticism: No True Scotsman!

pnathan on Hacker News

Last week, Robert C. Martin (“Uncle Bob”) wrote a blog post about how software teams need a foreman. A couple of days later, he responded to the first wave of criticism. He is wrong about this one.

First, I thought I’ll let better people than me respond to those blog posts. But after some interesting discussions on twitter, I decided to write a longer post. Because, reasoning why the foreman idea is wrong takes more than 140 characters - at least for me.

Can you write good code without testing or running it? Can you refactor without even compiling the code? Can you reason about code that only exists as a text document?

Earlier this week I wrote a blog post about doing TDD only in your head, without writing anything down. I called it “TDD like Mozart” after an idea J. B. Rainsberger had in a Tweet. It was a fun exercise to do, but it has some drawbacks: