Chris Lucian

The word peel comes from a process called Slice and Peel. Early in my time here at my current org, Llewellyn Falco in 2011/2012 came and trained the team on Slice and Peel. This is the idea that you can refactor tightly coupled code to be decoupled and tested with the Slice and Peel process. I had created a video on this process here in 2012 on making MVC3 dependencies testable with the ILoader interface in Approval Tests: 

 The idea is that you can remove hard to test or untestable dependencies by first moving their implementation to the top of the method, and then extracting the testable portion of the method into a new method. This process maintains the same API but allows you to put legacy code under test in a safe way.

This can be applied to any hard to test dependency not just databases like in the video. You will notice in the diagram above, Slice and Peel is utilized in both the UI development process and the refactoring process. When creating a new user interface, you may code by intention first, then implement the intent in such a way that you can mock out the UI dependencies. In the end, however if you can you probably want to use something like Approval Tests to lock down the UI.

As always you can throw more questions at me and I will try and blog in response!

P.S. While I was looking through my old youtube videos I found this one on metrics in the mob and I believe it is still good stuff!