Martin Fowler is a naturalized American software developer, author and international public speaker on software development, specialising in object-oriented analysis and design, UML, patterns, and agile software development methodologies, including extreme programming.
NUnit is an open-source unit testing framework for the .NET Framework and Mono. It serves the same purpose as JUnit does in the Java world, and is one of many programs in the xUnit family.
Programming Ruby is a book about the Ruby programming language by Dave Thomas and Andrew Hunt, authors of The Pragmatic Programmer. In the Ruby community, it is commonly known as "The PickAxe" because of the pickaxe on the cover. The book has helped Ruby to spread outside Japan.
The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master is a book about computer programming and software engineering, written by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas and published in October 1999. It is used as a textbook in related university courses. It was the first in a series of books under the label The Pragmatic Bookshelf. A second edition, The Pragmatic Programmer: Your Journey to Mastery was released in 2019 for the book's 20th anniversary, with major revisions and new material reflecting changes in the industry over the last twenty years.
Ruby on Rails, or Rails, is a server-side web application framework written in Ruby under the MIT License. Rails is a model–view–controller (MVC) framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and web pages. It encourages and facilitates the use of web standards such as JSON or XML for data transfer and HTML, CSS and JavaScript for user interfacing. In addition to MVC, Rails emphasizes the use of other well-known software engineering patterns and paradigms, including convention over configuration (CoC), don't repeat yourself (DRY), and the active record pattern.
In time management, timeboxing allocates a fixed time period, called a timebox, within which planned activity takes place. It is used by several project management approaches and for personal time management.
David Heinemeier Hansson is a Danish programmer, racing driver and the creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web development framework and the Instiki wiki. He is also a partner at the web-based software development firm Basecamp.
Software craftsmanship is an approach to software development that emphasizes the coding skills of the software developers. It is a response by software developers to the perceived ills of the mainstream software industry, including the prioritization of financial concerns over developer accountability.
The Practice of Programming (ISBN 0-201-61586-X) by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike is a 1999 book about computer programming and software engineering, published by Addison-Wesley.
Don't repeat yourself is a principle of software development aimed at reducing repetition of software patterns, replacing it with abstractions or using data normalization to avoid redundancy.
A code kata is an exercise in programming which helps programmers hone their skills through practice and repetition.
Sam Ruby is a prominent software developer who has made significant contributions to web standards and open source software projects. In particular he has contributed to the standardization of syndicated web feeds via his involvement with the Atom standard and the Feed Validator web service.
Andy Hunt is a writer of books on software development. Hunt co-authored The Pragmatic Programmer, ten other books and many articles, and was one of the 17 original authors of the Agile Manifesto and founders of the Agile Alliance. He and partner Dave Thomas founded the Pragmatic Bookshelf series of books for software developers. He also plays the trumpet, flugel horn, and keyboards.
Watir, is an open-source family of Ruby libraries for automating web browsers. It drives Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari, and is available as a RubyGems gem. Watir was primarily developed by Bret Pettichord and Paul Rogers.
Bruce A. Tate is an American author on the topic of the Java, Ruby, and Elixir programming languages and other computer software. He is also the CTO of icanmakeitbetter.com and the editor of Elixir books for the Pragmatic Bookshelf.
RSpec is a computer domain-specific language (DSL) testing tool written in the programming language Ruby to test Ruby code. It is a behavior-driven development (BDD) framework which is extensively used in production applications. The basic idea behind this concept is that of test-driven development (TDD) where the tests are written first and the development is based on writing just enough code that will fulfill those tests followed by refactoring. It contains its own mocking framework that is fully integrated into the framework based upon JMock. The simplicity in the RSpec syntax makes it one of the popular testing tools for Ruby applications. The RSpec tool can be used by installing the rspec gem which consists of three other gems, namely rspec-core, rspec-expectation and rspec-mock.
A work on software engineering by Ivar Jacobson et al. describes software entropy as follows:
A symbol in computer programming is a primitive data type whose instances have a unique human-readable form. Symbols can be used as identifiers. In some programming languages, they are called atoms. Uniqueness is enforced by holding them in a symbol table. The most common use of symbols by programmers is for performing language reflection, and most common indirectly is their use to create object linkages.
Extreme programming (XP) is a software development methodology which is intended to improve software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements. As a type of agile software development, it advocates frequent "releases" in short development cycles, which is intended to improve productivity and introduce checkpoints at which new customer requirements can be adopted.
Acceptance test–driven development (ATDD) is a development methodology based on communication between the business customers, the developers, and the testers. ATDD encompasses many of the same practices as specification by example (SBE), behavior-driven development (BDD), example-driven development (EDD), and support-driven development also called story test–driven development (SDD). All these processes aid developers and testers in understanding the customer's needs prior to implementation and allow customers to be able to converse in their own domain language.
