Pols Consulting

I’ve been wanting to update the site for some time now. At long last I have managed to migrate everying to wordpress and hack out a new theme along the way!

Please let me know if there are any problems on your browser.

Writing build tools is a nightmare these days. As the recent post on mockobjects.com points out, there are just sooooo many different java test frameworks to choose form (Junit 3, Junit4, TestNG, EasyMock, JMock1, and JMock2…).

Thankfully there will soon be a solution at hand…. The post explains that commons.testing and commons.mocking will provide a common, framework-agnostic API for writing tests and using mock objects.

Developers will be able to write to a single API and then select a test framework and mock object library to execute the tests at runtime by annotating their tests with the commons.testing annotations, writing a few dozen lines of XML configuration.

Furthermore, commons.testing can run tests that are defined entirely by XML configuration files instead of complex Java code. This will enable IT departments to greatly reduce the cost of pair programming and test driven development by having lower-cost, non-technical staff author the test cases that specify what the developers must implement in Java.

I think this is a little simplistic. The commons team have missed a trick. It’s not just testing frameworks that vary. There’s also a plethora of development tools that need to support commons.testing before developers can start using it in anger. What we really need is a commons.plugin framework.

With this, a cool new open-source project would automatically work on all development tools (IDEA, Eclipse, Bamboo, Cruise Control, Ant, Maven…). Now we’re talking…

Nat Pryce, Romilly Cocking and I have just run a session on Test Driven Development using the new (so new, it has only just been released) JMock 2.0 library at SPA2007.

We got a lot of positive feedback, so I thought I would share the slides and some example code that we developed for the session.

Jennitta Andrea has published a wonderful experience report in http://www.stickyminds.com/BetterSoftware called The Case of the Missing Fingerprint.

Well worth reading. Nice work.

The best part of XPDay is talking to people about what they do. I managed to catch Joe Walnes and Dan North’s talk on Awesome Acceptance Testing.

For as long as I can remember, Chris Matts and Dan North have been saying A user story’s behaviour is simply its acceptance criteria. If the system fulfils all the acceptance criteria, it’s behaving correctly; otherwise, it’s not.

What I had missed is their really nice acceptance criteria template.

Given some initial context,
When an event occurs,
then ensure some outcomes.

For example

Given Joe has a current account with a balance of £1 and an overdraft limit of £100,
When Joe withdraws £50.00,
then the balance will be £49.00.

This is so expressive and so wonderfully simple that anyone in the business can write them. Thanks to Joe for showing me this.

I recently had the opportunity to help Rachel Davies run a class on User Stories (I was more the unglamorous assistant). The class produced some wonderful examples that we wanted to share. Rachel has blogged them. These are some of my favourites.

As a boy I want a big garden that can house a kennel so that my mum can buy me a dog.

As a teenage daughter, I would like my own bathroom so I don’t have to share with my younger brother (Kevin).

As Grandma, I want big windows to watch what is happening in the neighbourhood so that I can gossip.

As a dog, I want to live close to the park so I can go for walks and sticks to play with would be nice.

Fantastic.

I came across a very strange number today while writing some unit tests.  Apparently Java thinks “10WTF?” is a perfectly valid number and does not throw a ParseException when you try converting the string to a number.

Here is the unit test to prove it!

import junit.framework.TestCase;
 
import java.text.DecimalFormat;
import java.text.ParseException;
 
public class StrangeNumberTest extends TestCase {
 
    public void testWierdJavaNumber() throws ParseException {
        DecimalFormat format = new DecimalFormat("##,###.00");
 
        assertEquals("Amazing, but true",
                     10,
                     (Long) format.parse("10WTF?"), 0);
    }
}

Romilly and I are running an introductory session at XPDay to evoke some of the fun and exhilaration that XP teams can expect as they work. It’s easy to read about the key practices and values of XP, but not so easy to relate them to real day-to-day project experiences.

After a brief introduction, the session will run an accelerated simulation of a day in the life of an XP team. See the developers, customer and coach in action in this fast-paced session and try to guess what will happen next!

I hope to see you at the conference for a chat and a beer!

I once had the pleasure of working on a team with Chris Stevenson. We had a ball. One thing I noticed was that he talked in keystrokes when you paired with him. He wouldn’t dream of saying, “let’s run all the tests and check in”, he would say “shift F10, Ctrl K”!

I must point out that Chris is not as geeky and dysfunctional as this may sound (in fact, he’s not dysfunctional at all ). This was simply a great way to help you learn the keyboard shortcut keys and stop faffing with the mouse!

I have just found a fantastic Chris substitute. It’s an Intellij plugin called KeyPromoter that displays a big hint every time you use the mouse. It even prompts you to enter a shortcut key for things you do that don’t already have one.

So, if you’re a loser who doesn’t have anyone to code with …

The XPDay conference in London is open for business. Once again it looks like it’s going to be a cracking conference, with interesting sessions and fabulous social events (where you learn the most!).

Romilly Cocking and I are running an introductory session on XP. The best way to learn something is to experience it. We haven’t fully worked out the logistics, but we want to make it as dynamic and interactive as possible. While we are somewhat constrained by only having a 1 hour slot, we are hoping to run the session as an XP project so that people new to XP can see how it works.
Hope you can make the conference. Thanks to John Nolan for the cheaky title of this post.