Wednesday 3 March 2010

Mapping personal practices

A long time ago Joe Walnes ran a session at the Extreme Tuesday Club where he encouraged us all to draw maps of our personal practices. As he put it:
We want your personal practices that you find important. Different people work in different ways, so we thought it would be interesting to discuss this.

In your own time, make a list of your 10 most important practices for coding and design. These do not have to be XP related and should be the most important things in your mind. For example: Separate interfaces from implementation, mock objects, follow the Law of Demeter, test driven development. Controversy encouraged - everyone's different.
Try to determine any relationships that may exist between these. Specifically, which practices support other practices. For example: unit testing supports refactoring and test driven design.
Draw a map of the relationships - like this: http://joe.truemesh.com/sample-structure.gif


Sadly the old XTC wiki has gone to that great stand-up in the sky but I was able to use the Wayback Machine's copy to rescue some people's maps.