I just got home after attending a talk by Robert Martin on Code Quality. It was really great to meet him after reading his book, to which I gave an excellent review.
Bob (that’s what people call him when you know him, kind of like Bob De Niro, though I don’t know him at all — what was I saying?) is very animated and pretty weird. He pulled out his geek card a few times which was funny. He even acted out a scene from Star Trek 2 where he was Ricardo Monteban. Yeah.
Anyway, the talk was very much like his book and enjoyed it thoroughly. It was also good to see other folks in the room interested in agility from around Houston. Most of them were .NET developers.
Robert Martin will be in town again next month giving a similar (but different) talk about clean code, possibly with Ruby. Hopefully I will be able to attend that as well.
I’ll leave you with some R.M. quotes…
“Not cleaning up your code is like not doing the dishes after dinner. The longer you wait, the more the mess piles up. Eventually it impedes you so much that you can’t even work”
“Having management dictate a specific code coverage percentage is madness. Code Coverage is a great tool for developer feedback, but mandating it will not provide value.”
“The great redesign in the sky fails — always.”
“So you want to clean up some code but it is just a mess? Uh [snickering] do you have tests? No? Your pretty much screwed.. [smiles]” — after which the book Working Effectivly with Legacy Code was recommended.
“Professionals write tests — first”