ScrumBut - No Release Planning

"Were doing Scrum-But ..." The ScrumBut phenomena has started to appear more and more as scrum has started to take its hold in the industry. I want to add one ScrumBut i was in charge of and it went like this: We were doing scrum but: We had no release planning. At the time we were undergoing so many directional shifts that each time we tried to flesh out a release plan, it changed drastically causing any planning effort to fail. Also our acting PO wasn't involved enough, a fact which also contributed to to difficulty of achieving a stable enough release plan. So we went and continued without it. And actually it wasn't a complete disaster, we achieved a very short sprint length of 1 week, we added to that various engineering practices like TDD, CI and Pair programming and we managed...

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Posted in: Agile practices. Planning,Scrum,Typemock

Open Houses

So many announcements today. Anyway next week Ill be giving two open houses: The first will be at Sela University on the 23/3 and will deal with the trouble of planning and estimation in the software world. (As far as I know most of the places are  taken, but if you're interested leave me a comment and I'll se what can be done) The second one will happen at Haifa on the 25/3 show why Design For testability is not a prerequisite for doing TDD. (the slides for this can be found he...

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Posted in: Events

ALT.NET Israel - 2nd Gathering

Been some time since our previous encounter so we thought we might enjoy another meeting. Anyway, we will meet on April 2nd and 3rd, at Sela University. Details are on the alt.net israel’s usergroup: http://groups.google.com/group/altnetisrael/browse_thread/thread/4ab4329c4bdd8253 (hebrew) I would like to thanks my associates at Sela making this possible. Signup link will be published short...

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Posted in: Events

NUnit Extensions - Adding Logic at Run Start

Most of the time using NUnit is very straight forward. Recently however I needed to add some functionality that will make life a little bit easier. In this post I'll show how to add some setup code that will be executed once at the start of the test run. Why is this useful? actually I don't have a clear answer. Here are some reasons I came up with : Run some special set up code which is just to costly to run at every setup (even if only for class setup). Transparently enforce some logic on all tests (i.e. without the need for other programmer to explicitly add that logic) you want to add some special behavior to the test runner   NUnit Event Listeners NUnit has several extension points that will adding almost any kind of logic to the framework. Ben Hall has posted some...

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Posted in: Frameworks.,NUnit,tips,tools,Unit Tests

Handling Bottle Necks in Scrum Team

During  yesterday open house I was asked an interesting question.  Some context first. The organization has chosen to adopt the Scrum methodology (good for them). As a scrum team member she is in charge of writing the automation for system test using a module inside the QC product (can anyone guess what's wrong here?). The issue is that she cant keep up. The team has 5 developers who write code and only her to write test automation (now do you see it?). So she was asking what is the "agile" solution to this. I don't know if this is The agile answer, but for me, when a team member cant keep up and doesn't manage to finish his tasks, he needs help. No agile process or in fact any other development process will change that. If a given person has too much work no matter if he works...

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Posted in: Agile practices. Random Thoughts,Scrum

Collection Asserts in MSTest (and some more)

Sometime I can miss the obvious. I've been working with MSTest framework for over a year now and up until today I completely missed the fact that beside the Assert class MSTest framework contains 2 other assert classes : StringAssert - used for string specific asserts like StartsWith, EndsWith and even support regular expression matching CollectionAssert - used for collection operation like Contains, AllItemsAreNotNull and the most useful AreEquivalent. Naturally NUnit also has equivalent classes (which of course I missed as well). Now the thing that really ticks me off is that I was asked this specific question twice in the last month and gave the wrong answer. Only today after I allocated 2 minutes to actually google it, I found out about it. Lesson learnt - For all consultant...

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Posted in: AUT,MSTest,NUnit,tips,tools,Unit Test Patterns,Unit Tests

The Fifth Value – Respect (cont.)

Some time ago I touched the subject of respect in the software development business. Yesterday I had the chance to talk with one of the persons working at  a client of mine. Beside of holding the respectful position of VP QA (the company is of medium size) the guy also allocate one day a week to maintain an IT business he once had which currently has a single client. After talking about how he ended up in this kind of arrangement, an obvious question for me was why does he keep on doing it. Isn't the fuss of handling a single customer to big to be worth the time? The answer I got was: Working for that client puts me in perspective. once a week i get the chance to function as a plain technician. This gives me the opportunity to get on my knees and work with the bits the bytes. For...

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Posted in: Agile Values,Random Thoughts,Self Improvment

Sela Open House

Last week I gave at Sela a lecture about Design For testability.  For all those who attended I want to thank you for coming. For all those who missed it, you might be able to catch it this week (I'll be giving it again at Sela on Tuesday) or if you happen to be located at the north parts of Israel it will be repeated nearer to you on the 25/3. For everyone else you can get the slides he...

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Posted in: C++,Frameworks.,Mocking,TDD,tools,Unit Test Patterns