I felt a bit uncomfortable about the ‘British talent’ remark, and at first I wasn’t sure why it affected me so. On one level, it’s just not true – one of the winning entries was headed by a kiwi friend, but while his particular nose was put out-of-joint, that didn’t quite explain fully my unease with and surprise at the remark.

Now, I realise that I’m reading too much into an off-hand tweet, and I don’t think for a minute that Tom was trying to appropriate our efforts, or spin them in any way. In fact, that he took the time to thank us is much appreciated. But, that said, my discomfort is real and bears examining.

The more I think about it, there’s just a cognitive gap in my mind between what we were doing and any kind of nationalism or jingoism – even though in this case all the projects were around and about UK government.

I think the reason Tom’s remark seemed so out-of-place may have something to do with the social and no-border nature of open-source software.

The project I worked on used bits of technology that directly come from Denmark, the USA, Germany, Japan, Australia. Being largely open sourced it would have had contributors from just about every country I could find on a map; and likely some I couldn’t.

What’s more, software like everything else it seems has become social. I’ve met many of the people that built it, if not in person then on irc or on mailing lists (or, if you insist, on twitter). I have a different relationship with open-sourced tools than I do, for example, with the Japanese TV I own. The software is whoever built it, from wherever they come. British talent? I just don’t care.

If we had completed something useful on the day, we would have shared that code with whoever wanted it, of whatever nationality. I just don’t recognise national borders in this work. It wouldn’t have been British code, just code. And, the environment into which it would have been released is a pan-national one.

I remember, when I was CTO of a tech start-up, there were people whose code and libraries we used, that we would have liked to have employed, but who were on visas that either prevented it or that required them to earn a certain amount annually, or were only around for another couple of months on a time-limited visa. It always seemed a bureaucratic nonsense to me.

I don’t want to seem all Star Trek about this – what next, abolish money? – but I think I’m privileged to work in a no-borders industry. I like this world where software doesn’t get exported and imported. Software gets written and then used. And, tackling comments like Tom’s when they pop up is an important part of maintaining this good.

What if Tom had said ‘want to see open-source flourishing in Britain?’ Ooh. That would have been good.

(Wish I hadn’t mentioned export tariffs for software. Who knows what crackpot ideas this government will come up with next.)

Most of the discussion wasn’t actually about TDD. So, perhaps we’d best start by defining what we mean here – or at least, the way I think you should see TDD. Then perhaps, we can talk about its merits or otherwise in a rational way. And, along the way let’s try not to dig new foxholes that piss-poor developers can snipe from.

TDD is a practice, situated in a discipline called Extreme Programming (XP). TDD is the second worst-named term in programming, only worsted by Extreme Programming itself. Seeing the practice within the broader discipline is important though, as we’ll come to see.

The reason it’s poorly named is that there’s really a two-step process that should be at work when practising TDD – test and code together and relentlessly refactor.

This is the first place where XP asserts itself. XP requires programming in the concrete, that our goal should be working software – indeed, that software only has value when it’s working. You can take this on many levels, but one I find enlightening is the pith of ‘code is abstract, working software concrete’. If you program all day (or in my past experience, for months at a time) without ever running your code, without making it concrete, then you have not been in the business of producing working software. You are making software that might, not software that does.

Most people agree at some level with this, although some still suggest that code readthroughs are the way to assert working software; some even suggest that thorough documentation is the answer. They may suggest this, even strongly defend it, but in practice those same people usually try to run the code before releasing it. Of course, XP does assert that code is best written in dialogue with other programmers, hence the practice of pair programming. This is, at most, a distraction from arguments about TDD.

As practitioners of TDD, we run our code all the time. We build harnesses to exercise our code all of the time – we call these harnesses tests. And we keep them around when we’re done with them. I think we’d say that we call them tests because they don’t just run the code, they check it too. But the reality is we call them tests because they’ve always been called tests and it was easier to sneak the practice into the typical IT shop.

(Another blog post waiting to be written here about BDD – why are we moving these harnesses away from code and towards documentation? It’s going the wrong way.)

I always find that this far, it’s easy to take most developers along with me. Nothing too controversial to this point, usually the naysayers here are people defending their own poor practices, and they know it. From this point in the real disagreements start…

The first thing the nodders add to this process is what I’ve snarkily called ‘the golden age before code’. This is some bizarre time before we start writing code where design is done and things are clarified. This is, according to some programmers whom I wouldn’t employ, where the real work is done. Factories are built and mouldings designed. Whoops, wrong industry. I mean, blueprints are drawn up and steelwork ordered. Whoops, wrong industry again.

What exactly is being designed in the golden age? The best answer seems to be code, not working software. In the golden age we are two steps removed from working software. We, as TDD zealots, reject this way of working – choosing to make code the level at which we design, not documents and diagrams. We don’t test our designs by coding them, we test our code by running it. This is an important point. TDD says we don’t stray far from the concrete world of running, working software – and crucially that we start in that world.

No API written without a client using it; no class interface without a instantiator; no method without a caller. Again, we call these second clients tests, and they’re part of the not-so-secret TDD magic that leads to better code. We try to keep them simple and precise, and we let the act of making the code run instruct us on how it should be written.

We find out early when interfaces are awkward, when classes have too many responsibilities, when methods aren’t needed and interfaces are bloated. We find this out by writing code, not by reading paper or drawing lines on whiteboards. And, us TDD folks say that this is the best way to do so. Because concrete working software is what we’re building. And because no plan survives the reality of battle. We know we don’t have all the answers when stood at the whiteboard drawing pictures; we know that our experience is pretty narrow when it comes down to it; and if we knew how to do it already, someone would have already done it. This humility is why TDD practitioners get a bad name for being arrogant. No, I don’t understand that either.

When coaching on this point in the past, I’ve used some pithy comment about how whiteboard ink was cheap. Then I found out how much those pens actually cost…

We’re nearly done defining TDD – and I haven’t even mentioned correctness or validation yet. Perhaps I won’t. It’s not that important in my understanding of TDD. Working software. That’s a better way to put it.

The final bit of TDD, refactoring, is really important and the one that gets mentioned the least. Again it has to do with the limits of our pre-cognition and a relentless prioritisation of the concrete over the abstract.

Refactoring is the process by which the code becomes more abstracted and better for it. That is, with TDD, we’ve seen that we don’t start with an abstract idea of what the software should be, untested and in a parallel medium. We start with working code. Refactoring is how we pull, pry and tease abstractions out of the code to make it cleaner, more pliable and more self-explanatory.

While we pull and pry these latent ideas and perspectives out of the code, we keep turning the code into working software by running our tests. We assert that the code duplication is the smell of these latent abstractions and we often start by trying to remove it. At this point, too, we care about naming and how the code expresses its intentions.

To my mind, this is where the smart folk shine. When people say that testing is hard, my response is often ‘yeah. But refactoring is the bitch.’ That’s one of the reasons you’ll find more written on testing than on refactoring, many more testing frameworks than refactoring tools. I don’t know why it gets so ignored in TDD discussions though, maybe we should change the name.

So that’s all really. TDD means something more than testing, and it pisses me off that we bog ourselves down in the kind of discussions that appeared on LRUG. If you want to have a pop at it, learn what it is first.

Now, we TDD-nuts believe that this ends up giving a better, less leaky, sharper design than we could have come up with on paper or at a whiteboard. You may not be able to accept that. But, as Tarantino might have said if he were a developer: that’s pride fucking with you. Fuck pride. Pride only hurts, it never helps.

In challenging TDD, I think you have to start by asking whether a process that goes from the concrete business of writing working software to an abstracted design is better than a process that goes the other way. I think it is, in fact I’m sure of it. An ex-colleague used to say ‘code doesn’t mind if it looks simple, but architects want to look clever.’ I think he had a point.

You can argue a hybrid model with some design (of boxes, on whiteboards) up-front has merits. I haven’t found, in my career, the results of that compromise to be useful. And I’m not sure the downsides of this approach, which tends towards over-engineering, are worth risking.

Anyway, the point of this post, which is longer and more abstract than I initially wanted was to describe what TDD is, why it’s a good thing, and to show that most of the criticisms I hear aren’t really talking about TDD at all.

We need to stop describing ad-supported things as ‘free’. Their might be no exchange of cash but there’s an exchange of attention and cognition. The marketing business justifies a lot of crap on the basis that it’s giving things away for free. If we paused and recognised that they’re not actually free then we might think harder about whether it’s the right thing to do. We might do smarter, better things if we recognise the cost we’re imposing on people without their permission.

I agree that advertising is not free – it’s a cost in terms of our attention, our time. But there’s a further aspect in which advertising costs us. The more relevant advertising becomes, the more likely it is to tell us things that we already know – relevancy here is more likely repetition. The more it tells us about things we were going to take advantage of anyway, the more it’s just a cost transferred directly from its medium to the good or service we purchase. Advertising, done best, directly makes things more expensive.

Quick example: when I buy a newspaper, I’m likely to see adverts for things I’m not going to buy anyway. I don’t drive, but there are plenty of car adverts in the papers. The car companies will never see the money they’ve spent on advertising from my wallet.

That portion of the newspaper revenue that the car adverts support is funded by someone else and effectively donated to me through the paper’s lower cover price. But as the adverts become more relevant, this dynamic changes and subsequently the newspaper, or more likely website, becomes less free to me.

And in between lick and split, in between the car makers and the journalists are the advertising folk’s overheads that I’m funding too.

If the internet works its disintermediating magic then advertising will eat itself. That’s good. Ok?

But go read Russell’s post anyway, it’s dead good.

Bold words, and sure to met with chuckles from the spivs currently dreaming up the next big advertising platform – maybe it’s mobile, maybe it’s online. They’ll be laughing all the way to the piggy-bank, little piggy tails bobbing, while anti-business, idealist anarchists are force-fed our own words. Or so they dream. This is the first in a series of posts explaining why we’ll be having a big piggy barbecue soon, and why we should be already smelling the bacon.

One of the reason the pig-spivs are deluded is that they don’t have a clue what advertising is. To them, advertising is either defined existentially as ‘what advertising people get paid for’ or recursively as ‘what advertising budgets are for.’ Deconstructing google’s marketing the ‘ad’ in Adwords refers to the budget-line that they get paid from rather than what they’re doing.

Alongside this Orwellian pig-spiv wordplay comes another odd assumption. That advertising in some way makes things cheaper. Having advertising on my mobile phone makes my mobile phone free; having advertising in a newspaper makes the journalism available for free. When you put it like that, it’s clear that advertising merely moves end-user cost from one activity, say journalism, and adds it on to another, say making cars. Now this may be a bargain we’re willing to strike, but, overall, it means that things cost more – largely to no-one’s benefit.

Reflect a while on this: the current economic difficulties are, to some degree, caused by folks in the States defaulting on their home-loans, often to pay medical and drug bills to companies that spend more in advertising than in either production or research. This is not a smart state of affairs.

One sliver of advertising that I think is safe is what I’m going to call ‘yellow pages advertising’. I have a need for something, and I want to see who can satisfy that need. And, crucially, I search to satisfy that need. Whether that’s by going to the yellow pages, searching on google, visiting a price comparison site, I search. The internet has made this process more information-rich, perhaps more price sensitive. The cost we bear for this advertising – being advertised to is always something that costs us in the end – pays for better information. I think that’s ok.

Most advertising, though, is of a different sort – I’m going to call it ’shove advertising’. It’s aim is either to push a product on to us, to influence our view of a product, or to create a demand where none existed. Because its aim is to distract rather than to inform – it’s aim is to make us do something that we hadn’t planned to, spend money we weren’t going to. It’s in essence distracting, intrusive. In essence I say to avoid this very odd assumption that there’s a holy grail in relevancy which can somehow make intrusions welcome, distractions non-distracting. Relevancy is the pig-spiv’s silk purse. Trying to turn shove advertising into yellow pages advertising. A shove is a shove – unless I’m being pushed out of the way of a speeding bendy-bus, shoves just aren’t welcome.

That’s enough for now, in the next post, I’m going to expand on why shove advertising has grown so prevalent, and why it won’t last. And why I believe the internet has changed this. Hopefully forever.

By any rational measures it should have been awful – I had my wallet and my mobile phone nicked by someone on the tube, and struggled through Saturday with a mild hangover and a dodgy back.

But all that faded away. I had the lucky chance to work with James Adam (something I’ve been wanted to do since I employed him, and then left the company) and James Andrews on a very silly hack. And, then we won a prize for making the chap from O’Reilly laugh. Perfect.

Here’s what we did – we call it ’subterranean homesick news’:

James reveals how we did it.

Thanks to the BBC for letting us play with their video and subtitling data. Worth it just to see Bob getting all political again. We live in hope that one day we’ll see Bob Dylan signing on all BBC programmes.

Let me tell you what happened on my way home tonight.

I was waiting at the Bus Stop, just East of New Cross Station. As it happened, I’d been out for a drink and a friend of mine had stolen my lighter. I asked someone who was walking past for a light and he took pains to give me one – it was windy and it took longer than it should have, but there we go.

The chap had walked 5 yards past the bus stop when a Police car screamed to a halt beside him. Three officers jumped out. One of them asked me if he was with another person, to which I replied he wasn’t. They made him turn out his pockets and then let him get on his way. They got back in to the car.

I thought that they were supposed to fill out a form to tell him why he’d been stopped and searched, so I tapped on the window of the police car and asked, politely, why they hadn’t. “I gave him a choice,” the Policeman driving said, “either I could he could come down to Deptford station and fill in a form which would take 20 minutes or he could go on his way”. I asked the driver for his number, which he freely gave me – PL 197.

I let it go at that – I don’t know the intricacies of the law in this case. The Police car performed a U-turn in the road to head back West into London. As it passed the bus stop the policeman driving made a V-sign at me. A few minutes later the car passed again going east and they waved at me, rudely, from the car.

Needless to say, I called the Met hotline to complain. Let’s see what happens here – this isn’t right.

He purported to work for Accuread, and his plastic ID looked plastic enough.

I’m not sure one can be too cynical about these things – perhaps he really did work for my gas supplier, perhaps he was from another gas company doing ‘market research’, most cynically, he didn’t work for a gas company at all.

If any of the latter answers are the case, then this is a serious matter. I’m wondering how to take it further.

I’ve sat through the required 100-hours of ‘input sessions’ (lessons); scraped through six hours of ‘class-work’ (lessons); my ‘elicitation’ (asking) skills have had the required ‘appropriacy’ (appropriateness); I’ve allowed students to ‘practise communicatively’ (speak); I’ve supplemented my lesson plans with ‘realia’ (props); I’ve ‘concept-checked’ (asked questions), ‘monitored’ (listened), and ‘facilitated’ (taught). By all accounts, I think, I deserve to pass.

Tomorrow, I have my final moderation interview (I’m sure there’s a less straightforward TEFL name for it). And, I fully intend to butcher my language in the way that they see fit.

“One final point”, we were taught (!) today in an lesson (!), “don’t use the word ‘teach’ in your interview, there are much more precise words like present or facilitate.” Give me strength!

What’s more, I intend, against all scientific advice, to talk about how carefully I matched my ‘class-work’ activities to individual students’ learning styles. I might even use the word ‘kinaesthetic’ if I’m feeling particularly ‘courageful’.

It’s ironic. I decided to leave the commercial world and try teaching to get away from this; to escape from the utter, utter nonsense that spews forth whenever business folk open their mouths. How disappointing to find not only the same paucity of speech but also the same pseudoscientific, cargo-culting crap in English teaching.

Must try not to lose my temper in the interview… must try not to lose my temper in the interview… must try not to lose my temper in the interview…

We wanted to buy the mother-in-law a simple-to-use Skype phone so that she can more cheaply call my various brothers- and sisters-in-law who are in far-flung places. BT’s overseas call charges are a scam.

We ordered a wireless phone from the Skype website. We were staying in Berlin and so we asked for it to be delivered to my brother-in-law’s address in Plymouth. Skype cancelled the order without informing me. Not only that, but when I found out and emailed them I received a canned response with a list of ‘some common reasons why orders are cancelled’. WTF?

I remained determined to reduce the mother-in-law’s phone bill. So, rushing to a nearby Comet store on Christmas Eve, I picked up a Philips Skype telephone. The box had a nice smiley person on it, and it oozed ease-of-use.

Cue two hours of trying to get the bloody thing installed and working on a windows PC – an install program that was bloody awful; settings that weren’t remembered between reboots; cryptic dialog boxes now appearing when the PC started up. At one point there were two boxes on the screen, one telling me to upgrade Skype to the latest version and the other telling me that if I did then the phone might stop working. Sigh.

Even when it did seem to be working the phone only intermittently showed the Skype contacts it was supposed to, and there was no way to call a number through Skype that hadn’t been entered into your computer’s contact list. Or at least, no way I could fathom out. Oh, and of course you only find this stuff out after you’ve left the phone to charge for ‘at least’ 24 hours.

Why do people put up with this crap? And why on earth does Skype give its seal-of-approval to such a piece of shite technology?

So, it went back to Comet. Ease-of-use my arse. To my complete surprise, the staff in Comet were really helpful and took the box back in good faith, crediting me back the full amount. Full marks there. I’ll shop there again because of it, and probably next time I’ll be shopping for a more expensive item.

There’s an example there that Virgin could learn from – be nice to people on the way out or they won’t come back. I bought Liz an iPhone for Christmas, and needed to transfer her number from Virgin to O2. However, Virgin provide no information on their website about how to leave their service, but plenty about how to switch from other suppliers to them. Nothing like being treated like an adult…

Oh yes, that’s a good idea. But, what happens when your survey, filled as it must be with leading questions and bound to give you the answers you want, doesn’t return the most flattering of results. Hmm, tricky.

Not, it seems, for Power Reviews.

What happens if only 40% of your survey respondents say that they ‘research products online more than half the time’, whatever that question means?

Well, if you start by saying that 65% of users fall into a ‘Social Researcher’ category then you can say 64% of them ‘research products online more than half the time’. That pesky 40% number is transformed, magically, into a clear majority. Breathe easy PR people, the press release, spun into a more positive light, can be released.

That may not be exactly what they did, but it’s common practice. Take note: if the ’social researcher’ category was defined post hoc, then this is a simple statistical fallacy – akin to the the sharpshooter fallacy.

Statistically, the numbers would be meaningless, but that’s not really the point, is it? And that’s just one example of what I thought to be misleading use of statistics in that press release. Please, Power Reviews, could you publish the complete research so I can reassure myself as to your methods and conclusions?

That aside, I dislike most the banality of this genre of press release. Power Reviews are certainly not alone in releasing this bland flavour of news – pay for a survey, scatter-spam the results, wait for coverage. It’s all a little bit patronising, really.

I’ll no doubt get accused of bias here since my old company, Reevoo, did a similar press release a few weeks ago. I’m not biased.

Guys, come on, since when does doing a simple survey constitute news? We’re all consumers, aren’t we? We all know whether we really use reviews to make purchases or not, don’t we? And so do your customers, yes?

And, for all the evidence that people are disposed to say that they used reviews to make their purchases, we don’t need to pretend that advertising doesn’t work. Do we?

I know you chaps have real data, about people’s real online behaviour, not about their opinion of what they were doing after the fact. How about publishing some of that?

Oh, and Journalists, when these press releases land on your desk, please scribble all over them and send them straight back. Don’t play their game and publish it.