technojunk.net

I had fun at XPDay this year. It felt less “extreme” than in previous years, as people seemed to focus on pragmatic advice and techniques rather than evangelism.

One of my favourite sessions was Dan and Joe’s Awesome Acceptance Testing. They identified 5 aspects to any acceptance testing regime:

• Automation - the tools and frameworks you use to automate bits of your application and tests
• Vocabulary - the ubiquitous language you try and create in your tests
• Syntax - how you express the vocabularly in a test
• Intent - what is the behaviour you are actually trying to test
• Harness - the tools and framework you use to run your tests and report on them

(Read on …)

On a recent trip to Rhodes, I finally got a chance to experiment with the Depth of Field settings on the 350D.

Here’s a shot of Rhodes Old Town (a world-heritage site) with a reasonably high depth of field, so that as much of the image as possible is in focus. To increase the depth of field, the aperture had to be reduced by increasing the lens’ f-number. This reduces the amount of light entering the camera, but still gives a clear shot on a bright day like this.

In contrast here’s a a shot of the old fortifications by the marina, taken through a crevice. I’ve opened up the aperture to decrease the depth of field, so that the fortifications are in focus but not the crevice.

And here’s a dog that looked bored…

Thomas and I will be presenting our session “Against All Odds” at XP Day 2006 on November 28th. It’s an experience report on Agile Transition, where we will mainly be talking about:

• Legacy Technology
• Fixed Price Contracts
• Offsite-customers
• Product Development

If we ever figure out how to cram that lot into our 30 minute slot, that is!

A good practice in any project is to showcase working software to your stakeholders every iteration. It’s even more important when developing a product, as the feedback and discussion on the features you have implemented really does drive out what to implement next.

Recently we were looking around for a tool that we could use to record one of our showcases as a Flash demo. Not only does it give stakeholders who missed the meeting an opportunity to see what was demoed, it also gives us a record of how our software evolved every iteration. Nice for posterity.

We used Wink, a freeware tutorial and presentation creation program. It’s a truly superb piece of software that allows you to capture a windows session, annotate it with labels and back/next buttons and then render the whole lot as a Flash movie. It’s extremely easy to use - we put together several Flash demos that showcased different features of our product in just a few hours. Excellent!

As my project has been doing some Ajax work recently, we’ve been looking around for a good way of acceptance testing our Ajax components. Being an agile project, we break our requirements up into stories and write an acceptance test for each story. The acceptance test verifies that the acceptance criteria in the story are met, i.e. that we’ve built what we thought we would. They provide feedback on the external quality of the system, as opposed to unit tests which provide feedback on the internal quality.

(Read on …)