DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by agilejoe

Using Context as an example group in rSpec

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 06:34:53 GMT

This perplexed me because the rDoc indicates that [context] method is an alias for [describe] method. Turns out there are two different places where describe is defined. One in main (the outermost layer) and one inside an ExampleGroup. The one in the example group isn't aliased.

Customer Perception Model: Know thy customer.

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 17:48:28 GMT

It's important to know how your "working" software is being received out in the field. Immediate customer feedback is one thing during a release but what about after the code actually gets out into the field. How are those users feeling!

Information Radiators: Make life visible

Sat, 08 Dec 2007 22:42:07 GMT

A couple of people have asked me how we track our work for our iterations. We basically use a somewhat simple information radiator. Information radiators serve to quickly give everyone on the project team a quick indication on what needs to be done, what is being worked on, and what has been done. Information radiators can be as a simple as a few cards on a cork board to huge 54" plasma displays. It's up your team to determine what works best.

BDD Macro and Template Usage screencast

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 18:33:48 GMT

What timing I just finished reading JP's blog about how he paired with Scott Bellware and modified his Macro for BDD. Well, while they were busy doing that I decided to make a screencast on some modifications I did to JP's initial macro. I extended his macro in concert with some ReSharper templates I use to show just how to take advantage of BDD. Funny thing is I extended it to do the same thing he and Scott did but I added a little flare to it :-) Take a look at the screen cast to see what I mean.

NSpec merges with NBehave!

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 11:01:02 GMT

I am pleased to announce that Tim Haughton has agreed to join his NSpec project with NBehave! So what does this mean for you the developers? Well it means that you have one OSS project team supporting multiple BDD frameworks for the .Net framework! Think of it more as a centralized project for the many facets of BDD in the .Net community.

Complexity Based Programming

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 22:27:41 GMT

So what is it? As an Agile practitioner do you ever struggle having to justify Paired Programming to management? Typical management reaction to even the idea of Paired Programming is "Why would I pay two programmers to do something what one programmer can do?" You can rant and rave about quality and breadth of knowledge exchange but to management money talks and (you can fill in the rest). So what can you do to better explain the argument from a cost perspective as well as quality perspective?

Behave# merges with NBehave

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 20:19:20 GMT

I am proud to say that Behave# and Morgan Persson's NBehave project have combined into one OSS project under the moniker of NBehave. We decided to keep the NBehave name because as Morgan kindly put it: "...it connects to the cousin framework(s) in other languages/technologies like RSpec/NSpec, JUnit/NUnit, Hibernate/NHibernate etc. so it would only be natural to have RBehave/JBehave and NBehave."

Enterprise Agile Generations

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 22:07:19 GMT

"The many flavors of Agile development, while powerful are very sensitive to some degree. The Adoption of these processes and practices require cultural changes from management all the way down to development and testing. The failure at any one of these points can lead to catastrophic break down in the alleged implemented Agile methodology that leaves adopters with a rather unsettling perspective of Agile all together." In order to deal with simply having organizations give up, I was thinking of this evolutionary scale for Enterprise Agile adoption. I will refer to these evolutionary tracts as Generations. This is not an attempt to rate Agile maturity as some organization may exist fine in Gen 1 for a period of time and have great success. This is merely my perception on the possibilities of growth in Agile adoption to a certain state of development nirvana. (Do you hear the flowers singing.) J. (If there is already a term for this out there, please let me know. )

Great Dane, Golden Retriever, Chihuahua == Developer Estimates

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 23:13:58 GMT

I just read Ayende's and Udi's post on estimation. I was intrigued because over the last three year we have been using "story units" to estimate our work load for all our projects to great success.

Attempting to Demystify Behavior Driven Development

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 05:46:02 GMT

After receiving several emails and reading Roy Osherove's post on Behave#, I wanted to give more incite and answer some questions that were asked about Behave# and BDD in general.

Good bye NUnit.Behave hello Behave#

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 06:31:02 GMT

Most of you who read my blog know that I have been working on NUnit.Behave which was meant to mirror the functionality of rbehave in .Net. My initial spike was a success but it required that you inherit from an base NUnit Test Fixture. Even I wouldn't use it! So I spent some time decoupling it from NUnit into it's own framework. At the same time my idea caught on and Jimmy Bogard decided to do the same thing. Well to make a long story short we have been collaborating on the differences between our two frameworks over the last week and have decided to go with Behave#. I love OSS, where else could this be possible!

Announcing the ALT.NET Open Space Conference - Oct 5th through 7th - A

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 08:58:15 GMT

We will soon open the conference website and begin to collect registrations for the ALT.NET Conference. I guess you could consider this as an official "pre" announcement. Save the date, and stay tuned! The ALT.NET conference will take place in Austin, TX from 5PM on Friday, Oct 5th, through noon on Sunday, October 7th at the St. Edwards University Professional Education Center. Participating in the organizing committee, are: Jeremy Miller Ayende Rahien Hamilton Verissimo Bret Pettichord Roy Osherove Jean-Paul Boodhoo David Laribee James Kovacs Raymond Lewallen Wendy Friedlander

NUnit's new Constraint model

Sun, 22 Jul 2007 20:54:39 GMT

I was working on some code this weekend and happened to come across NUnit 2.4's new constraint objects. I can't believe I just now found out about this! I am glad to see the the mocking frameworks influenced this addition to NUnit. Being a big fan of fluent interfaces, I love how the new constraint model allows the assertion model to be easily read.

More BDD xBehave Madness!

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 01:16:02 GMT

Well over the past week or so I have been working off and on with improving the usage of NUnit.Behave. It started off being tightly coupled with NUnit since you actually had to inherit an abstract fixture that exposed the "Given, When, Then" BDD constructs. With a bit of tinkering with C# generics and some fluent interface magic, I managed to decouple the code into its own, dare I say, framework.

Introducing NUnit.Behave or insert what ever other catchy name

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 04:16:01 GMT

OK I was bored yesterday and I decided to update what I had worked on the other day from Dan North's post on rbehave.

RBehave with NUnit

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 20:54:46 GMT

I just read Dan North's article on Introducing RBehave. In a jealous rage of not being able to utilize Ruby fully in .Net. (YET) I decided to see if I could pull off what Dan had created in rbehave using NUnit. Because I am a huge proponent of reuse, I didn't want to extend my existing Test Coverage with a brand new framework. After all BDD coupled with ReSharper and Visual Studio make for happy testing.

Agile Leadership and Coaching (Development Manager's Need to grow up!)

Thu, 17 May 2007 03:31:01 GMT

With modern business needs changing at a rapid pace, software development must respond in tandem. Agile Development Methodologies promote responding to change, by balancing order and chaos. This is an art form more than it is a practice. All too often have I chatted with development managers who have attempted to enact agile, only to fail. Is it the methodologies fault or a fault in leadership and understanding?

Forcing users to provide a message when committing to SVN/TortoiseSVN

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 09:31:02 GMT

A quick tutorial on how to require your developers to provide a message when committing a change to your Subversion respository.

A Discussion on Domain Driven Design: Value Objects

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 07:16:01 GMT

In my previous post we talked about Entities. Entities have a lot of overhead associated with them. They have a full lifecycle from cradle to grave. They also have identity which forces the domain model to be very expressive in tracking and coordinating their transient states. It would be great if we could compositionally break up the Entity into smaller objects that form descriptive attributes of the Entity itself but don't have identity. Luckily for us these sometimes smaller objects are referred to as Value Objects in Domain Driven Design.

A Discussion on Domain Driven Design: Entities

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 09:31:01 GMT

My last post was intended to help better explain how the ubiquitous language forms the back bone of Domain Driven Design (DDD). I am hoping that this post helps to explain some of the more foundational artifacts of DDD, namely Entities. What is an entity? Is it a business object? Is it a class that has persistence? Is it a sentient being manifested in the form of a polymorphic construct that is based on a real world object? Ok well maybe the latter is definitely out of scope but as we see there are many possibilities of what an entity is. Hopefully I will help to shed some light on the subject. Either that or I will help to perpetuate the existing confusion. At least we go somewhere!

Agile Logistics

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 14:48:18 GMT

Found this article accidently. The title caught my eye. Anyway it is kind of funny how the characteristics that Prof. Fisher outlines mirror that of agile development.

Simple NHibernate Example, Part 5: Repository Testing

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 03:31:01 GMT

In the last few posts, we explored very simple concepts from the point of view of DDD and BDD/TDD. In this post, I will put together a very simple testing harness to show how to roll together these concepts in the context of NHibernate.

A Discussion on Domain Driven Design

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 05:01:01 GMT

X Driven Development, is what we use to determine if the software we are building works in accordance with what we expect it to do. But how do we know what we are building is in accordance with the actual business domain? Do you look to the 500 page requirements document for the answers? Do you look at the wire frame that looks nothing like what you have actually designed? Do you trust the acceptance test that the product owner has authored and believes this is the way it should work? What do you do?

Using contraints with Rhino Mocks

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 05:01:01 GMT

A short example of using AbstractContraint objects with Rhino mocks to make mocking out and comparing values simpler.

Fast Switching with LINQ

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 08:46:01 GMT

Jomo Fisher from the Microsoft C# development team shows how to use LINQ expressions to implement a very fast look up that can yield a 900% performance improvement over standard dictionary searches.