Martin Fowler's Blog, page 36

Garmin Oregon 600

I recently bought a Garmin Oregon 600 handheld satnav (GPS) and took it on a vacation, hiking in Switzerland. I find it fun to use, a worthwhile upgrade on my earlier Garmin 60 CSx. It has a bright, clear screen, good battery life, and you can easily find decent open-source topo maps to put on it.

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Replacing Throwing Exceptions with Notification in Validations

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If you’re validating some data, you usually shouldn’t be using exceptions to signal validation failures. Here I describe how I’d refactor such code into using the Notification pattern.

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Panchgani, India

Contract and End-to-End tests for Microservices

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Toby Clemson finishes his guide to techniques for testing microservices. He adds two more classes of testing: contract tests test the interface contract of a microservice, end-to-end tests verify the whole system - but are prone to many difficulties. He concludes by looking at how these various kinds of tests should be assembled into an effective test portfolio.

Videos from XConf Manchester

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I gave a suite of talks at the ThoughtWorks-organized XConf in Manchester a couple of months ago. They have now put videos up for the three talks I gave (each is around 20 minutes):

Agile Essence and Fluency: where I talk about the essential qualities of agile software development and the agile fluency model of Larsen and Shore
Continuous Delivery: what this technique is, its ingredients, how it differs from continuous deployment and its three main benefits
Microservices: some its common characteristics, its relationship with SOA, how big a microservice should be, the pros and cons of microservices, and the prerequisites you need to have to go live with them.

Video of Agile Panel at goto Aarhus

At goto Denmark this year, I was on a panel discussing the past, present, and future of agile software development. I talked about the past, Prag Dave Thomas took a cynical look at the present, and Jez Humble, Katherine Kirk and Tatiana Badiceanu looked at where it was going.

Sony a6000 with 16-70mm lens

A few months ago I bought a Sony a6000 camera because I was tired of the weight on my Canon DLSR. Here’s my informal review of the camera paired with the 16-70mm lens, which outlines why it’s now the camera I like to use most of the time.

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Arnold Arboretum, Boston, MA

Speaking at ThoughtWorks Rethink in Dallas

I’ll be speaking in Dallas on Saturday December 6th for a ThoughtWorks event We have also got Dave “Pragmatic” Thomas in, to talk about the death of agile. I’ll be speaking with my colleague, Molly Bartlett Dishman, about how architecture works in an agile environment.

Integration and Component tests for Microservices

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Toby Clemson continues his discussion of techniques for testing microservices, with two more styles of testing. Integration tests probe the interaction a service has with its data stores and external components. Component tests provide a coarse-grained test of the entire service, which can be usefully performed both in-process and out-of-process.