Mocks Aren't Stubs | Martin Fowler

Mocks Aren't Stubs

The term 'Mock Objects' has become a popular one to describe special case objects that mimic real objects for testing. Most language environments now have frameworks that make it easy to create mock objects. What's often not realized, however, is that mock objects are but one form of special case test object, one that enables a different style of testing. In this article I'll explain how mock objects work, how they encourage testing based on behavior verification, and how the community around them uses them to develop a different style of testing.

It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns of Daily Stand-up Meetings | Martin Fowler

It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns of Daily Stand-up Meetings | Martin Fowler

The daily stand-up meeting (also known as a "daily scrum", a "daily huddle", a "morning roll-call", etc.) is simple to describe: the whole team meets every day for a quick status update. We stand up to keep the meeting short. That's it. But this short definition does not really tell you the subtle details that distinguish a good stand-up from a bad one.

Given the apparent simplicity of stand-ups, I was quite surprised the first time I saw one that wasn't working. It was immediately obvious to me what was wrong but I realized that it was not obvious to the team. I realized that my team was not aware of the underlying principles and details that would allowed them to diagnose and solve problems with stand-ups.

People who have experienced good stand-ups will generally know what can be done when things aren't working well. For novice stand-up attendees, when things go wrong, it is much less likely that they'll figure out what to do. One way to approach this issue is to claim that it's all a matter of tacit knowledge and novices just need to attend more well-run stand-ups. I believe, however, that it's much more likely that given no assistance, novices will simply abandon the practice of daily stand-ups. This would be unfortunate since well-run stand-ups add significant value to projects.

This is my attempt to communicate some of the previously tacit knowledge on the benefits and consequences of common practices for daily stand-ups. These patterns of daily stand-up meetings are intended to help new practitioners as well as remind experienced practitioners of what they might already know in their gut.

Feature Branch - Martin Fowler

FeatureBranch

With the rise of Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS) such as git and Mercurial, I've seen more conversations about strategies for branching and merging and how they fit in with Continuous Integration (CI). There's a bit of confusion here, particularly on the practice of feature branching and how it fits in with CI.