Integration Tests are not enough - Revisited

A while ago I wrote that Integration Tests are not enough (Part I). i Think that J. B. Rainsberger does the subject much more justice then in his latest session (Agile 2009) titled: integration tests are a scam. During his talk he also mentioned, as a side note, that what takes time and experience to master when doing TDD is the ability to "listen" to your tests and understand what they are telling you. I couldn't agree more, I wonder how we can help speed up this process. Any though...

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Posted in: Development Practices,Integration Tests,Self Improvment,TDD

YAGNI - It all Connects

Everything in software connects. Here a common thread that connects the following agile? principles: YAGNI - You Aint Gonna Need It. YAGNI is referred to the fact that most time in software development its useless to try and think ahead since most of the time we just don't really know if we are going to need this or not. as Ron Jeffries puts it: "Always implement things when you actually need them, never when you just foresee that you need them." KISS - Keep It Simple (Stupid) Which is the same as saying do "The simplest thing that could possibly work" we use this phrase when we want to emphasize that simplicity in software has usually much more value than we initially think. There is no one perfect design I'm not sure this has...

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Posted in: Agile Principles,Design,Random Thoughts

Practical Scrum Course

At the end of the first day in my Practical Scrum course I've asked 2 questions at the end of the day: 1) What was the most surprising thing you have heard today? 2) What is the most controversial thing you have heard today? here's what I've got: The most surprising 1) That even for the simplest "project" it takes 2-3 tries to reach a good way of doing things. (In response to an exercise we conducted) 2) That the waterfall methodology is an example of a flawed model. (taken from wikipedia: Royce was presenting this model as an example of a flawed, non-working model (Royce 1970).) 3) That so far the Scrum process is not that far from what we are actually doing. 4) That plans don't have to be too detailed, and paperwork may actually be less important then we think. The most controversial...

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Posted in: Random Thoughts,Scrum

Agile Testing Days

Ill be going to the Agile Testing Days conference in October and will be giving a session on "Quality and Short Release Cycle". It's my first time speaking at such a big conference along leading figures in our industry so I'm very excited and quite nervous. on a similar note the latest issue of "Testing experience" journal has been released and includes an article of mine (page 16). The issue is all about Agile Testing, includes some very interesting articles and can be downloaded here. Let me know what you thi...

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Posted in: Quality

Branching is evil

Almost a year ago I blogged about "Source Branches". Over the past year this somewhat have become an ongoing discussion I had repeated a few times with. In fact believe that post was my most commented one ever. Today Martin Fowler has posted about the differences between Simple Feature Branch - each feature is developed on its own branch and merged when finished. Continuing Integration (CI) - no branching Promiscuous Integration (PI)- same as feature branching with the twist that each feature directly merges with other features that might affect it. he also explained the risks and benefits of each approach, and I really liked that post What I would add to that post is the human aspects that each approach brings. Feature Branch - The easy way out In my eyes feature branching...

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Posted in: Agile Values,Source COntrol

Running all tests in solution using MSTest

There aren't many times I truly have something bad to say about MS. Its not that I'm a great fun, but I admit that in most cases they do get the job done (it just takes a couple of tries though). However, there is one thing that always tick me when working with MS products and that their ability to create product which doesn't work well with anything else besides other MS products. Normally I'm not into conspiracies and would of written it off as simple mistakes, but I'm guessing I just have to much respect for MS developers. And the thing is that this always happen at the really annoying small things when you least expect it, but when encountered really make you go *#*#*!*!$*!*#!. and the story goes like this: At one of my clients I'm helping setup the build server to run all the unit...

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Posted in: MSTest,tips,tools