cross-post from bbv blog

When software projects grow both in age and size the developers often struggle with the structure of the code. It gets more and more difficult to find the class you have to change for a new requirement. In this post, I’ll show you how we organize our code and how we derive our structure directly from the requirements.

.NET, Agile, Architecture, Clean Code, Methodology, Test Driven Development Agile, Architecture, Clean Code, TDD

Over the last couple of years, I’ve done a lot of pair programming. Pair programming inside my team, at customer sites, in coding dojos and in my open source projects.

Pair programming is really a great and effective experience when performed by an pair of developers knowing how to pair program.

Unfortunately, you cannot just put two developers in front of a single computer and expect them to perform perfectly from the start. Pair programming has to be learned. Both developers need to learn the difference between being the driver (the one holding the keyboard) and the navigator. See here for details.

During my pair programming sessions I encountered some recurrent stereotypes, which I list in this post.

Agile, Methodology Pair Programming

Pair programming – two developers working together at a single computer – can result in better software written faster, but only if you know what you do.

Pair programming is not just sitting together and code as you would when being alone. Unfortunately, this is what most developers practice – resulting in a painful and ineffective experience.

To get most out of pair programming, you first have to know your setup.

Agile, Methodology, Test Driven Development Pair Programming, TDD

Do you program or do you already TDD?
If you prefer to do TDD you will love the eclipse plug-in called MoreUnit. It is as simple as powerful. All it does is executing tests from corresponding productive class and makes it very simple to change between them.
Just press Ctrl-J (like Jump) to jump from test to implementing class and the other way. Or press Ctrl-R (like Run) to run the test regardless if you are in the test or the implementation class.

Agile, Java, Test Driven Development Agile, eclipse, Java, Mockito, TDD, Test Driven Development, Testing, Unit Test, unit testing

These are the slides along with some comments from a presentation I gave lately in the bbv .Net System boot camp – the yearly education week of my division in my company.

Once upon a time, Agile Software development came to our software development country.

Like a monster, Agile software methodologies scared the hell out of us. Suddenly, we had to find ways how to build software so that we could keep up with the high rate of change, just-in-time requirements and a sacrificial offering – a product increment – every two weeks (our Sprint length).

The way we were used to build software was not up to this task. We were used to dig a big hole of new functionality and to build something great over months. The structure of our source code and our engineering practices were no good to match the Agile monster.

So we had to come up with some new “weapons” to stand a chance:

Agile, Architecture, Methodology Agile, Architecture, ATDD, Design, DI, DRY, SOLID, TDD

cross-post from bbv Blog

This is a list of actions that Scrum Masters at bbv Software Services AG have applied successfully in their teams to improve performance (= how much gets done in an amount of time). Please note that these actions were created to respond to specific problems found in real world projects. They may not be applicable in general in any situation.

I’d be happy to read your experiences and feedback in the comments section.

Agile, Methodology Agile, scrum, ScrumMaster, team

I’m working in an agile software development team which develops a fairly complex automation system for manufacturing facilities. We are using Test Driven Development as our main tool to improve the overall quality of the code. We all knew that we are going to have a large number of unit tests during the life cycle of the software. Before we started writing unit tests we decided that we need a test naming convention.

Agile, Clean Code, Test Driven Development TDD, test naming convention, Unit Test

In our project we are using Sql Compact 4.0 for testing the nhibernate mappings and our queries. In production environment we use Sql Server 2008 Express R2, therefore we thought that Sql Compact 4.0 is as close as it can get for a file database. Recently we moved our continuous integration system from cruisecontrol.net to jetbrain’s teamcity 6. The teamcity agent is installed on a Windows 2003 R2 x64 server. But our unit tests accessing sql compact 4.0 didn’t work on teamcity! Let’s look closer what happened and how we solved it.

.NET, Agile NAnt, Sql Server Compact 4.0, TeamCity, x64, x86

I just added my short book review of xUnit Test Patterns – Refactoring Test Code by Gerard Meszaros to our books page.

Happy reading…

Agile, Announcement, Test Driven Development

This is a presentation I hold in 2010 for bbv Software Services AG. It shows how my team lives Scrum.

I’d be glad to see your feedback in the comments section…

Agile, Methodology Agile, scrum