Robert Baillie

It's easier to re-build a system from its tests than to re-build the tests from their system. You can measure code complexity, adherence to standards and test coverage; you can't measure quality of design. Formal and flexible are not mutually exclusive. The tests should pass, first time, every time (unless you're changing them or the code). Flexing your Right BICEP is a sure-fire way to quality tests. Test code is production code and it deserves the same level of care. Prototypes should always be thrown away. Documentation is good, self documenting code is better, code that doesn't need documentation is best. If you're getting bogged down in the process then the process is wrong. Agility without structure is just hacking. Pairing allows good practices to spread. Pairing allows bad practices to spread. Cycling the pairs every day is hard work. Team leaders should be inside the team, not outside it. Project Managers are there to facilitate the practice of developing software, not to...

To all those visitors who've visited the site with IE over the last 6 months and had a borken layout. All apologies... I had no idea that long titles in the Orablogs digest was breaking things. The offending feed has been removed.

An idea I'm thinking of trying to get implemented at our place is a required reading list for all our developers. A collection of books that will improve the way that developers think about their code, and they ways in which they solve problems. The company would buy the books as gifts to the employees, maybe one or two every three months. Some questions though: Is it fair for a company to expect its employees to read educational material out of hours? Conversely: Is it fair for an employee to expect to be moved forward in their career without a little bit of personal development outside the office? If anyone has any books out there that they'd recommend - please let me know. Otherwise, here's my initial ideas - the first three would be in your welcome pack: Update:Gary Myers came up with a good point, being that any book should really be readable on public transport. That probably rules out Code Complete (although I read it on the tube, I can see that it's a little tricky),...