me.andering – Willem van den Ende

We are partnering with local companies to provide our training curriculum in other countries. We started the Mastering Unit Testing course after we found many teams have started writing unit tests, but very few have experienced the benefits of hard-core test-driven development.

“You have some experience writing unit tests, but wonder how you could get more out of unit testing. Register for the Mastering Unit Testing training to experience how test driven development can make development faster and more enjoyable. You’ll learn how working test-first lets you create better designed code, and understand why unit testing techniques that are ‘simple’ in theory can be difficult to practice. Past participants have experienced less defects in production code, as well as higher velocity, which leads to happier clients and more fun in your job!”

See the Mastering Unit Testing page on the iLean site for registration and details. The first course is scheduled for September 24 and 25. After that we’ve also got our Mastering legacy code, November 16 and 17, also in Antwerp.

Televox by d.billy

photo found through Photo Suggest

Steve Freeman did a great writeup of the session Marc Evers and I hosted at the Software Craftsmanship Conference: Mock Roles not Objects, live and in person.

What can I add besides a big thank you, especially since Steve asked for feedback before posting and incorporated a comment about my habitual way of going about naming – creating a bit more code on an empty system and then go mad about naming after I have something more to generalize on.

A few things:

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Marc and I just got word from Jason Gorman, that our session Responsibility Driven Design with Mock Objects has been accepted for the conference that has outlawed index cards, post-its and lego: the Software Craftsmanship Conference in London, February 26.

The year is getting off to a good start – we did an iteration on the session proposal January 1st. To fit with the spirit of the conference, we’ve added a coders’ dojo to it. I look forward to going back to the BBC site, having facilitated in-house dojos before.

I’m still wondering what happened with our other proposal – the continuous integration install party. It might not have gotten through, but I guess we could run it as a BoF (possibly at the SPA conference in April, also in london).

I’ve been looking (and still am, but less) for a simple solution to test-drive website development with browser integration. Rob Westgeest pointed me to Firewatir. Firewatir is a Ruby wrapper around Firefox through the JSSH shell extension.

Firewatir is new and still under development, but looks promising to me, as it fullfills the four R’s: Easy to Read, (w)Rite, Run and Refactor. The only thing that is required is a firefox plugin for JSSH and a ruby library (installable through rubygems). Current downsides are scant documentation and the test process seems to hang sometimes. We also had to make some extensions to start Firefox automatically under linux (Firewatir was originally made for windows). The scant documentation you can get around if you read the tests.

We had a session on browser testing at Agile Open Europe this week. Apparently, links to Firewatir and its (scant) documentation are not that easy to find from some countries.

• Introduction to FireWatir
• Posts on FireWatir in Angrez’s blog (the developer)
• Download page for FireWatir, manual and JSSH extension

Hope this helps to make them easier to find. I’d be curious to know what you are going to use it for

The second continuous integration & testing conference (still labeled conference, still Open Space) is taking place in London, October 6 and 7, which is a bit closer to me than last years’ in Chicago. I’ve heard good things about CITCON (don’t know exactly what…) and as continuous integration and integration and acceptance testing are still areas with lots of development and challenges, this is bound to be interesting again.

This would also be the first conference announcement I got through a comment on this blog, so the organisers have an interesting approach to marketing at least .

Oh, and did I mention this conference is free (as in free beer)? – it would also be free as in free software, as the contents are up to you, the potential participants…

Continuous Integration and Testing Conference April 7-8, 2006 – Chicago, IL, USA. I won’t be able to attend, but this open space event might be worth your while. I don’t know the organisers, but they seem to know themselves pretty well :

“Jeffrey and Paul have been planning the conference for more than 9 months and feel that just doing it is better than languishing in analysis paralysis. Early April was targetted as a good time.”

I hope next year Jeffrey and Paul will call it an unconference. At the agile open last year we had some participants who had missed the fact there was no conference program. On the other hand, most of the CITCON site is about open space and the open space rules
Through Lasse’s weblog – CITCON in Chicago