Texas Sharpshooters and Test-Driven Development

The Texas Sharpshooter fallacy describes a bias where patterns are forced to fit preconceived beliefs. TDD increases the likelihood that tests reflect intended behavior rather than confirming flawed code, thus avoiding the “sharpshooting” of writing tests to suit existing, potentially faulty implementations.

Add Value and Make Noise

Expecting your work to speak for itself may be one of the reasons why you are not getting the career progression you deserve. In addition to doing good important work, you must also make noise.

Life Lessons from Statistics

When you understand basic statistics, some things in life start to make a little more sense.

The Curse of Knowledge

You don’t have to wait till you’re an expert to teach others what you’ve learned. In fact, waiting till you become an expert may be a bad idea due to something called “the curse of knowledge”.

Avoid Fakers in Unit Tests

Unless you are fuzz testing or your goal is to create property-based tests, test data generators (a.k.a. fakers) are likely to do more harm than good in the long run.

Lessons Along the Way

From every job or task you’ve done, seek wisdom gained, not battles won.

What is a Unit Test?

There is a lot of confusion about what unit tests are and how they differ from integration tests. This post provides one viewpoint on what unit tests are.

Duplication over Abstraction in Unit Tests

In your production code, favor abstraction over duplication. In your unit tests, favor duplication over abstraction.

What Does Bad Code Look Like?

What does bad code look like? It may be more interesting to think about bad code in terms of what it feels like.

Are your Tests Necessary and Useful?

Some automated tests are unnecessary or problematic. Here are some questions to ask yourself about each test you write.