“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

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:

Don’t Stop thinking about Naming

Steve stopped coding in the session to good effect. The Narrator class that emerged from the discussion made the design Speak to me much more.

Start thinking about tomorrow

Now that I’ve gotten better at working in small steps, maybe I can stop  being paralysed by my former analysis paralysis and stand still to think about naming more often. This happens automagically when I pair with Marc or Rob Westgeest, which helps both the clarity of the code and the way the tests cover our behinds.

Bring an “imaginary Steve”

I could bring an “imaginary Steve” to work more often when I’m out coaching a team on my own. like tomorrow. We just managed to put all the necessary bits together in Week I. I’m completely addicted to showing something more or less fully functional to the client – that way  we can get the dialogue going, so that we are less likely to create yet another IT invented system that has little value to its users. However, the fun is going to be short-lived if we can’t respond to their needs (quickly, so we can keep the dialogue going).

Now is the time for imaginary Steve (and imaginary Marc and Rob) and the rest of the team to  have a good hard look at our naming, and figure out where the responsibilities feel more comfortable.

Especially since from the two new components we chose one feels like it has received a lot of love from its developers (Wicket) while the other (which will remain nameless until we’ve either managed to contain it, dropped it, or I have to admit I was wrong) might start to infest the rest of the code with one-letter variables and obscure Java constructs that would be interesting for a workshop on Legacy code (and I’ll include the tests for that code in the definition of Legacy code temporarily). Luckily the team decided to use the power of Open Source today and spontaneously started to refactor the base test code. More of that when we continue tomorrow – I expect slower will be faster at this point.

If that is not enough, or your imaginary Steve turned up too late, you can also bring an imaginary Ivan Moore or Mike Hill – their session about giving your code some love showed once more that good design comes in small doses.

Come enjoy the show on Thursday

Marc and I will go on tour to Agile Belgium in Gent on Thursday, to play the Responsibility Driven Design with Mocking show again. The setlist has been extended since we have an extra hour, so there will be some jamming and solo-ing by the audience with Class Responsibility Collaboration Cards and of course more Live Coding. Hopefully Rob will be there to support us (the cold visited his house too apparently).

P.S. bringing an Imaginary Jeff Patton in Week I (User Story Mapping) works wonders to get something useful working ASARP (As Soon As Responsibly Possible).

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).

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

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…

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