Question for your agile coach certification :

What do you do if your colleague does not want to write unit tests, because he believes that really good programmers don’t need unit tests?

Correct Answer:

Give your colleague a copy of John Bentley’s Programming Pearls. 100% ‘agile’ free content, and for real programmers only. It is chock full of cool algorithms, bitmanipulations and other stuff real programmers love.
Let him read it, and I doubt that he’ll still say that real programmers don’t need unit tests.

(For the un-real programmers: programming pearls is eXtremely Pragmatic, and full of advice on testing, debugging, asking the right questions to understand the problem, when optimizations are useful and when not etc. There are also many examples of problems that seem simple to program, with implementations that are surprisingly error-prone.

I read this book because someone else on the panel for ‘a good read‘ at next friday’s minispa recommended it.

I don’t often read ‘real programmers’ books anymore, and I’m glad this one was on the list – really good. I hope to see you next friday at minispa in London)