Toward a Galvanizing Definition of Technical Debt

Michael Feathers
December 23, 2016

Everyone involved in software development seems to know what Technical Debt is. It’s a powerful metaphor. In Ward Cunningham’s original formulation, Technical Debt was the accumulated distance between your understanding of the domain and the understanding that the system reflects. We all start out with some understanding of a problem, and we . . .

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The Ergonomics of Type Checking

Michael Feathers
September 07, 2016

The debate between proponents of static and dynamic typing never seems to die down, but it has matured. Most people I encounter seem to be ready to accede that people can do good work in a dynamically typed language. On the other side, it’s becoming more and more apparent that as type systems grow, the number of error classes we can eradicate . . .

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Characterization Testing

Writing tests to describe and fix existing code

Michael Feathers
August 08, 2016

I think that the most confusing thing about testing is the word testing. We use it for many things, from exploratory testing and manual testing to unit testing and other forms of automation. The core issue is that we need to know that our code works, and we’ve lumped together a variety of practices and put them under this banner. We can look . . .

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To Kill Code

Michael Feathers
February 03, 2016

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Economics is a great frame for understanding problems, but it can cloud many issues as well. The software development community has fought for years against the idea that IT should be viewed as a cost center. We’d like to see it as a value creating investment. Yet, as much as we’d like to see it that way, we speak about code as a . . .

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Variable Capture Considered Harmful

Michael Feathers
December 09, 2015

According to wikipedia, after Dijkstra’s letter Go To Statement Considered Harmful there were at least 65 papers published with titles like ‘X Considered Harmful’, most of them generating heat but little light. I’m using the convention ironically because, well, this is just a nit. It shouldn't be controversial all. :-)

Variable . . .

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The Universality of Postel's Law

Michael Feathers
September 21, 2015

Design is deep topic. One could say it’s the deepest. It’s about making decisions that affect choices in the world. When you design a chair, what you’ve really done is make a set of choices about how people using it will sit and what their experience will be. People sitting on chairs have choices too. They can defy your expectations by . . .

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Moving Past the Scaling Myth

Discontinuous Transition in Process and Architecture

Michael Feathers
July 01, 2015

I’m going to the Agile 2015 conference this year. It’ll be the first time I’ve been to that conference in half a decade. Agile has been around for over 15 years now and at a certain point you feel like you’ve seen the important developments. In truth, I felt that way years ago but I kept going to agile conferences primarily to catch up with . . .

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