Continuous Deliveryby Jez Humble and David Farley


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Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and David Farley


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I use a variety of PDF tools in my editorial work. I frequently create, mark up, manipulate, and combine PDFs. In addition, I contribute to the open source Platpus typesetting project, whose major output format is PDFs. And the PDF plugin is my specific bailiwick. So, over the years, I've come to know a thing or two about PDFs, as well as the limitations of PDF tools.

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During the last 12-18 months, TDD has broken into the mainstream, it seems. And now, we're starting to see some backlash, as its limitations become better understood. Here is a sample discussion from Artima.com. Cédric Beust, who wrote the commentary, is not some unknown guy with a weird name. He wrote the TestNG unit testing framework, which is second only to JUnit in popularity.

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InformIT.com has posted my interview with Alexander Stepanov (of STL fame) and his co-author Paul McJones. Their just-released book, Elements of Programming, tries to map algorithm implementations back to symbolic logic and algebraic theorems, thereby--in theory--improving their design and correctness.

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I have been using Groovy to write functional tests for Platypus, the open-source typesetting project I work on. I am likely to make Groovy the default scripting language for Platypus in the next milestone. In the process, I've had to come up to speed on Groovy and I've been reading through and looking over the various Groovy titles on the market. Here's my take.

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I have recently been playing with Fan, a programming language that reminds me a lot of Groovy, but has additional capabilities, such as actors. Its binaries run either on the JVM or .NET. Below is my recent column in SDTimes about the language. 

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According to a recent HP poster, these were the rules in Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard's famous garage:

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I have gone through "Uncle Bob" Martin's new book, Clean Code,

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The most enduringly popular post on this blog is Perfecting OO's Small Classes and Short Methods, which presents a short series of stringent guidelines to help an imperative-trained developer master OO.

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Last week, Jeff Fredrick and I did a day-long code review of Platypus. We used a pair-programming approach, with Jeff driving and I helping with the navigation. Eventually, we got into the input parser, which parses input lines into a series of tokens: text, commmands, macros, and comments. Macros can require a second parsing pass, and commands often require additional parsing of parameters.

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Before getting into my concerns about whether unit testing's popularity has peaked, let me state that I think unit testing is the most important benefit wrought by the agile revolution. I agree that you can write perfectly good programs without unit tests (we did put man on the moon in 1969, after all), but for most programs of any size, you're likely to be far better off using unit tests than not.

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My interview with Donald Knuth is now posted. It's a long piece, that has some unusually interesting points, including:

- why Knuth doesn't believe in designing code for reuse
- he's most unconvinced of multithreading and multicore on the desktop
- discussion of the tools he uses to program and write (including Ubuntu)
- etc.


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