Development Central

Today I was working on refactoring several classes. I had some tests in place, but these were edging towards integration tests. The design of our persistence layer is a bit too coupled to a database. Because of this, the tests took more than a few seconds to run. After a few successful refactorings, I started to get some Level 3 confidence and made multiple changes before running the tests.

Naturally, four of the tests failed. I was reluctant to roll back all my changes, and it took me quite some time to get all the tests to pass. I was lucky, too, as every additional change I made increased the risk of further failures.

Jeremy Miller’s MSDN article on Incremental Delivery Through Continuous Design makes a number of implicit assumptions. I wouldn’t have noticed these before, but my former manager’s healthy skepticism is starting to rub off on me. (Thanks Bob!) ;-)

Here are the ones I caught:

• Teams are made up of experienced Agile developers (or developers are mentored)
• Developers are disciplined
• Management is supportive
• Iterative development is appropriate to the project
• An Object Relational Mapping framework is not “infrastructure” but is a “given”

The last one is particularly blatant. Please note that I’m a huge fan of Agile, particularly XP. But an O/RM is infrastructure. As always, an organization needs to evaluate build vs. buy (vs. use open source). Depending on your platform and choice of language, that decision isn’t always clear-cut.

“Successful agile projects require far more discipline than any other methodology I’ve ever used.” - Brad Wilson

Thanks to Phil at work for suggesting this tip!

In addition to launching programs, Launchy can also launch web sites via the Weby plugin. It comes pre-configured with numerous searches, but here’s how to add MSDN’s new Bing search.

Start Launchy and go to Options. Select the Plugins tab and the Weby plugin. Click the plus (+) sign and enter the following:

Name: MSDN
URL: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/
Query: Search/en-US/?query=%s&ac=8

Click OK.

Now bring up Launchy and type “msdn” (it’s case-insensitive), then hit the Tab key. It should show “MSDN > “. Type in a word or phrase to search for and hit Enter. It should bring up MSDN Search in your default browser.

Double-clicking - how quaint! ;-)

I’m planning to go to the one-day Software Craftsmanship North America event in Chicago August 26. This could be one of those “I was there” events, and they have several interesting speakers. I’m hoping there’s more to it than just patting ourselves on the back, though.