What's up

Lot's of interesting reading, but I didn't post since I had lost the password for a while.

I have been reading/working Ron Jeffries book "Extreme Programming in C#". I find it interesting and helpful. It has been a pretty good way to try TDD, which I haven't used much in my own work. Another theme is evolving the codebase in a natural way using regular refactoring. I have always done a lot of refactoring without knowing it had a name (a la Monsieur Jourdain) so I do enjoy watching him change the code in a natural way.

One useful thing I note is related to his YAGNI ('you aren't going to need it') principle. I sometimes get hung up trying to build a more general design than is currently needed, especially since I have found it hard to retrofit projects when additional functionality required late in a project. In particular, I once got hung up on the same capability that he has trouble with in the last chapters of his book - to wit, an Undo feature. He firmly believes that it is better to keep building continually usable software with limited functionality than to push for a complete project with full functionality that extends the development timeframe.

More to come...