The developer Doctor is in! Doc Norton that is

Apr 11, 2023

When you feel sick call the Doctor!

When your code is sick call, Doc Norton!

Doctor Who?

Doc Norton has been helping developers for many years. His focus is on things like TDD. He puts you at ease quickly.

Doc also helps teams deliver. He is the author of Escape Velocity. It helps teams focus on the right things.

Here are a few tips he shared.

Doc is a big fan of TDD or Test Driven Development. He finds it quite valuable. It helps teams deliver quality.

Along with TDD, refactoring goes hand in hand. As you test you find improvements.

One personal warning. Don’t attempt to refactor without unit tests. It doesn’t end well!

The Pomodoro technique is setting 25 minutes to do focused work. Then you take a break. After that, you can repeat.

Doc recommends this to help us focus. I have also found this quite helpful. Make sure to mute or close other distractions during this time.

When I asked Doc about developer habits he listed these.

Pair and Mob for better results. Experiment with different ways to gain new insights. Plus you will learn new tricks.

Create simple things in small steps. Don’t get fancy. Take one step instead of a giant leap.

Be meticulous about composition. Look at each object added. Does it make sense?

I struggle with this one. This is where I like to leverage Doc’s first habit. Ask someone.

Validate before, during, and after. Don’t just test it once. Things change. Mistakes happen.

See Doc’s first tip. This aligns well with TDD. Ensure quality throughout the process.

Know the problem you are solving. Define the main goal from the outset. Make sure everyone agrees.

The stakeholders want a solution. Most often they don’t care how. Solve the problem and move on.

Release ridiculously often. If you release monthly. Try to release it twice a month.

Look for techniques to enable this. Perhaps you need feature flags. Or trunk-based development. Release more often.

Automation over documentation. I tend to agree with Doc on this one. However, my Business Analysts friends may disagree.

Documentation gets out of date quickly. Where if something is automated it works. Reading about is lovely. It working is even better.

On the whole, Doc reminds developers of the basics. Mastery comes from understanding and applying them. Doc is a treasure we need to listen to.