Red Squirrel Reflections
Dave Hoover explores the psychology of software development

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Do No Harm
Saturday, October 4, 2003

I'm still reading Code Complete and finding innumerable precursors and foundations to most of the XP practices. The book quoted Jerry Weinberg yet again (page 747), and it made me think of test-driven development (yet again)...

"Opening up a working system is more like opening up a human brain and replacing a nerve than opening up a sink and replacing a washer. Would maintenance be easier if it was called 'Software Brain Surgery?'"

Jerry's metaphor immediately made me think that keeping the patient conscious during brain surgery is like maintaining an automated suite of unit tests and running it repeatedly during refactoring. Like physicians, software developers' working with existing code must strive first and foremost to do no harm.

Posted by Dave

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