ISerializable - Roy Osherove's Blog

How to start agile development in your team

RoyOsherove — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:08:41 GMT

Got this in the mail:

Hi Roy,
From time to time I'm reading your blog, and I must say that I'm quite behind. I would like to start an Agile Process in our company, but to be honest I do not have any knowledge from where to start.
So from where to start ?

Wow. what a simple and powerful question.

I’d start incrementally, doing the things that are easiest but also make small “wins” for the team and process. Here is where I’d start (order matters)

start doing daily stand up meeting
start doing automated builds
start working in pairs on relatively complicated problems
start doing code reviews
start showing visible progress
start trying to show demos every two or three weeks
start learning unit testing
learn how to code better, design better
start doing TDD

But, be sure to have what it takes as a team lead to drive this thing.

I’m sure y’all in the comments can add to this discussion!

Course: Leading Software Teams – Essential Practices for team leads

RoyOsherove — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 09:07:54 GMT

This november the 22nd I’ll be doing a one day workshop for software team leads on the essentials of leading a software team, and required leadership skills that need to be developed.

The full course agenda can be found here.

The course is in Israel, and in Hebrew.

Course Description:

Congratulations - you’re a new team lead!
You’re very skilled technically, but can you drive a team of software developers to achieve amazing things?

Can you see the full software delivery process from start to end?
You know what proper code should look like, but do you know how to drive you team members to write such code?
You know that short iterations work great, but you have a bunch of developers who don’t believe this is such a great idea, and you’re stuck!
You believe in so many things, and yet, even as a team lead, you feel powerless to drive them with your team members.

Test driven design – Willed vs. Forced Designs

RoyOsherove — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:59:48 GMT

I’m writing this as a typemock employee, but also as someone who has sat on the other side of the line for several good years, and can argue in both ways. The following, I feel, is true no matter where I work.

There are two ways people use tests to drive design, as far as I see. one is great, and I agree with, the other is not so great and I don’t agree with it. Sadly, both of them are categorized together these days, and the baby gets thrown out with the bath water - You either use both (BAD) or you use neither (BAD!)

Here are the two usage patterns:

#1 Willed Design

By writing tests, you can observe the usability of your design from a consumer perspective, and can decide whether or not you like it, and change it accordingly

#2 Forced Design

By using a subset of the available isolation frameworks(rhino, moq, nmock) or specific techniques *manual mocks and stubs) you discover cases that are not technically “mockable” or “fakeable” and use that as a sign for design change.

I highly agree with #1, and highly disagree with #2.

#1 makes sense.

You get to decide what is a good and bad design, and the experience of using that design from the test perspective is your guideline. But you make the rules on what you like and don’t like.

#2 is problematic for several reasons:

The tool decides. Not you.

You let an automated tool (rhino mocks, Moq etc..) tell you when your design is OK or not. That point alone should go against anything ALT.NET has ever stood for, doesn’t it? If you need a tool to tell you what is good or bad design, then you are doing it wrong. You should either know good design beforehad, or you shoud pair program together to find the best design, or you should learn by a mentor who can review your design mistakes, but don’t ever let a tool tell you what is right and what isn’t, especially when the only reason that tool works for that is by chance and not on purpose (as you’ll see in the next point)

A technical limitation that grew into something else

tools like rhino and MOQ and NMOCK just happen to support some OO ideas that seem good enough for design activities because of the underlying technology they use underneath. It’s pretty simple – they all use some form of either generating code at runtime that inherits from a class or interface, and then overrides methods on it (therefore they need to be virtual methods and non sealed classes, or an interface) or they use a proxy of some kind which underneath does pretty much the same things. (typemock is an exception since it uses a profiler api which has non of these requirements) . simply that means that the reason rhino, or MOQ or NMOCK “let you know” that you should use an interface somewhere, is a technical limitation of the tools, not a choice. Ayende was asked once what he’d do if he was technically able to fake static methods in rhino mocks – would he add that feature? “in the blink of an eye” he answered. and I agree. adding more options to the tool just extends the limitations of the possible design under test, not the “goodness” of it.

Languages like Ruby, Javascript, Python etc.. have isolation frameworks (or in some cases don’t even need such frameworks) that fully support any type of behavior changing, regardless of the design, since the language is less strict. yet, somehow, proper design arises in those languages tool. perhaps those languages are just “too powerful” and should not be used because they will cause you to do bad design? see the previous point for my answer.

What happens if tomorrow, or using C# 4.0 those tools get such abilities? will you all stop using them?

of course, you don’t have to use isolation frameworks to be dissuaded by the idea of limiting your design by using something – in this case a technique: using manual mocks and stubs in an object oriented language is just as “limiting” technically as is using one of those frameworks. You’re still bound to play within the simple laws of OO and using a design that is even a little out of place (even though it might make perfect sense for your application for security, performance or other reasons) is either untestable, or a general no no.

see the previous point for what i think about that.

the point here is that you’re using a technical limitation of a tool or a technique to tell you what to do instead of thinking for yourself and learning proper design guidelines. that limitation just happens to be somewhat partially consistent with what you might currently to believe to be true for design. but technically, it is a limitation that could end soon. when it changes it’s behavior, will you just change your design guidelines? switch or won’t upgrade to a new version of the language? or actually start using your head and your peers to see what’s right and what’s not?

The Typemock Dilemma

Typemock gets a lot of flack for not inhibiting the design of the program, and I can see how people would be afraid to lose that limitation in other tools, since all they head from alpha geeks in .NET is that if it’s not “testable” then your design is wrong. worse, they hear “if you need typemock your design is wrong”.

there’s nothing a silly as absolute “fact” theories in the software world. In fact, let me go out and say that all fact theories are wrong. How that’s for irony?

The message should be, I feel, more like “here are some principles of good design as we think of it today”, but instead it is based on tool choice and not on technicques or craftsmanship.

Unfortunately, I don’t think getting rid of #2 is possible in .NET today without using a tool like typemock, and that’s a shame, since it means that, because it costs money, people in the community will still want to use the free tools, which force design, instead of allowing them to decide on it like the mature developers they are.

Maybe it’s time to have some sort of free version of Isolator so that everyone can benefit. what do you think?

DWORD – a new video cast

RoyOsherove — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:40:08 GMT

I’m trying out something new. You can check it out here.

Recommended books part III

RoyOsherove — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:48:49 GMT

as usual, the book link list can be found here.

Recommended books - part II

RoyOsherove — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 23:22:01 GMT

as usual, the book link list can be found here.

Recommended books - part 1

RoyOsherove — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:17:02 GMT

You can find the list of books with links over here:

http://osherove.com/books-i-like

TypeMOQ API

RoyOsherove — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:18:14 GMT

I was fiddling around with the typemock API, see what it would belike to use it in a more MOQ like manner:

to support this, all the code you need, including the Faker class exists here. you’d need to reference the typemock dll and the typemock c# API dll to make it work.

I’m not sure I’m crazy about it, but it is shorter. I’m not sure it’s as readable, though.

Introducing Typemock IntelliTest

RoyOsherove — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 19:25:31 GMT

We just released the latest version (5.4.2) of Typemock Isolator, with one cool Addon built in - Typemock Intellitest.

what’s it about? in one word: productivity.

Here's what it does:

(here's the full info)

Test Review: MEF

RoyOsherove — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 05:19:37 GMT

it’s late at night, and my new baby just went to sleep, again.

Time for another test review! (you can find other test reviews here)

Test Review - MEF from Roy Osherove on Vimeo.

Why Google Chrome and FireFox are a big security risk for anyone using them

RoyOsherove — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:18:39 GMT

I’ve stopped using Internet Explorer – Too damn slow, memory hogging beast.

I’ve stopped using FireFox, for the same reasons, funnily enough (until I found out about the security flaw).

I’m now using Safari – it’s blazing fast, reliable and does not have that aweful security risk that Chrome does.

What is it?

Google Chrome will reveal your saved passwords to anyone who wants them, with no possibility of securing them with a master password. The image below shows what happens when I use Chrome to save my password for gmail, I can then just go an open chrome options, click “Show Saved passwords” and select a line there, and click “Show password” (in the image that button is titled “Hide password” after clicking it.

With Firefox, the default behavior is to allow anyone to see your passwords as well, but you can actively choose to use a master password in firefox to make this less accessible. the default is that it’s open for anyone to see. With Chrome, there isn’t even a “master password” option.

Until they fix this, I am not going to use Chrome, I don’t care how fast it is. Safari is fast and doesn’t show my passwords.

K THX BY

Poll: Which mocking\isolation framework do you use?

RoyOsherove — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 21:34:34 GMT

Time for the bi-annual frameworks poll!

Which isolation framework do you mostly use these days?(online surveys)

Unit Test Definition 2.0

RoyOsherove — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:26:37 GMT

Update: added the difference from integration tests at the end of the post.

Here’s my latest definition of what a unit test is:

A unit test is a fast, in-memory, consistent, automated and repeatable test of a functional unit-of-work in the system.

A unit of work is any functional scenario in the system that contains logic. it can be as short as a function, or it can span multiple classes and functions, and it provides internal or business value to the system under test.

how is it different that an integration test?

An integration test usually is not in-memory: it may touch the disk file system, databases, registry or other shared resources. It may read or need a configuration file of the file system, wheas a unit test can be fully configured in-memory, for example.

An integration test will usually run much slower because it does not run in-memory.

An integration test can be less consistent – it may use threads or random number generators so that the result of the test is not always consistent.

Steal My Book

RoyOsherove — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:16:33 GMT

last night I found out on twitter, that people are spreading the full PDF versions of my book. What made me angry was that the person who did this had the audacity to also retweet stuff I said, a few minutes after spreading a link to an illegal copy of my book.

then I got a few responses, some supportive, some telling me that “that’s the way things are” and that it might actually be a good thing.

So I decided to have an experiment.

I’m going to give you some links to download an illegal, full PDF version of my book. A book that took me three years to finish. A book that I started with zero kids, and was released with me having two kids. A book that has changed during its writing, that I learned a lot from, and that I am making about 2$ off of every PRINT copy sold, and much less on PDF copies sold (in short – the money ain’t great).

I want you to steal my book as PDF. and if you like it, I want you to be straight about it, and purchase either the PDF version of it, or buy a print version on Manning or Amazon’s site.

Here goes:

Buy the print or the PDF eBook on the Manning site

Buy the print book on Amazon (FYI – every print copy has a coupon for a full PDF copy inside)

Download the FULL Illegal PDF of the book from RapidShare

(or just google for an illegal version)

Answer this poll so that I know if this was a smart idea or not

[You’re reading my .NET Blog. I’ve also started a team leadership blog over at 5Whys.com – it’s all about leading software teams. You can also attend varioius courses on TDD and team leadership that I provide]

Announcing the Team Leadership Google Group

RoyOsherove — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:20:24 GMT

I believe the next wave of issues that we will need to start solving is that of software team leadership.

We may all believe in the stuff that agile, tdd and the like bring to the company, but we often have problems following through on these, since we can't find a way to drive the people in our teams to "get" these things. Team leadership is the essential skill that binds together the will do be better and the ability to drive a team to be better, and to eventually truly become a self directing group of people.
I think most software leads suck at people skills, at driving their team and getting things ready to be more agile. and I think that's one of the main reasons some agile adoptions fail so badly.

But I have not found a place to get answers on leading teams at the people level, or even at the basic skill level that would target exactly this role.
I started http://5whys.com for that reason, but I believe that many of us will benefit from a more open and honest dialog about managing people, the problems we deal with, and ways to solve them.

I invite you to join the group at http://groups.google.com/group/leading-teams