No, QA is not your designated tester
No, QA is not your designated tester. “QA” is a process, not a role: its real job is to help the team grow.
Articles tagged “Software craft”
Don’t Repeat Yourself… but just a little bit anyway
It’s better to have a little intentional duplication than premature abstraction that mixes business rules that have no business being together.
Bug, error, or expected case: what is the business intent?
When should you throw an exception, return an error, or model the absence of a value? The answer lies in the business intent.
Design tokens: the grammar of your Design System
Before components, tokens. How to structure a coherent Design System using a well-thought-out token architecture.
What if your TypeScript model prevented inconsistent states?
TypeScript is often used only superficially. This is particularly true for Union Types, which help prevent inconsistent states.
You’re using exceptions incorrectly
Exceptions are not meant to handle predictable errors. Meet the Result type, an alternative to try/catch.
Testing Randomness: A Textbook Example of Property-Based Testing
PBT verifies that a business invariant is always satisfied regardless of the parameters and the return value of the function being tested.
Whatever works
A call for pragmatism in software development: avoid dogma, observe what works, and leave room for doubt.
The Trials and Tribulations of Optimization
An example of algorithm optimization (the skyscraper game) and the lessons that can be learned from it. Pareto’s Law applies fully.
100% Code Coverage: The Never-Ending Race
This metric isn’t very useful if you don’t know what lies behind it… It does tell you something, however, mainly when it’s low!
50 shades of tests
Not all tests fit into a single test pyramid. Several aspects must be considered: purpose, granularity, and assertion methods.
End-to-end tests: how to get off on the right foot
End-to-end tests should be used sparingly, as they are costly to write (Page Model) and costly to run. Here’s how to proceed.
Architecture Decision Record
ADR helps streamline a team’s architectural decisions and prevents them from being constantly called into question.
Don’t write code that guesses the future
Avoid over-anticipating: don’t lay the groundwork for future features; they remain hypothetical. Instead, write code that can evolve.
Walking Skeleton
The Walking Skeleton aims to lay a solid foundation for reaching the MVP while minimizing technical debt. It’s a step worth formalizing.
Trunk-Based Development, a radical solution to “merge hell”
Trunk-Based Development, straight out of Extreme Programming, is an excellent alternative to GitFlow, but study the prerequisites carefully.
An object is not what you think it is
Building an object means starting with its behavior. The data it encapsulates is derived from that and constitutes an implementation detail.
I’m not going to sell you a “Clean Code” training course
“Clean Code” is a reference book: reading it cover to cover would make little sense. You need to read it, experiment, and come back to it often.
Library vs. Framework
You call a library, but it’s the framework that calls you. The difference is inversion of control.
Test-Driven Development: Just One Tool Among Many
While TDD is a wonderful tool, it is not suitable for all development projects, as it risks falling prey to the “law of the instrument.”
Emulating nominal typing in TypeScript
Structural typing is limiting when it comes to defensive programming. Fortunately, it is possible to emulate nominal typing (branding).
You’re mistaken…
A distinction must be made between development errors, which are handled with exceptions, and user input errors.
3 Metaphors for Computer Code
Code is intangible. So, to make it more understandable, we use metaphors from the real world, particularly real estate.
TDD is dead. Long live testing.
A point-by-point rebuttal of the seminal article by David Heinemeier Hansson, a critic of Test-Driven Development.
JavaScript: When You Are the Compiler
I challenge anyone to prove to me that it’s more efficient to do without static typing when building a JavaScript application.
Your First Steps in Software Craftsmanship
Clean Code is a good starting point, followed by TDD and Functional Programming. Wait a bit before diving into DDD and refactoring!
