Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Fun development

Several things came together today, and though not evident at first, they are all somewhat related.

FIRST

My pair kept asking why I was so adamant about not writing any code without specifying it first. I explained how specifying kept us focused on what we needed to do, helped us drive out the overall design, and eventually provided a safety net for testing and refactoring. In particular, we were practicing outside-in development in Rails, using Cucumber and RSpec. The goals we were achieving, in order, were:

  1. understanding our problem
  2. designing and developing our solution
  3. building up tests for the future.

The cucumber scenarios help us focus on understanding the requirements, from the end-user's point of view. They also drive out the high-level interface of the app, particularly the URL's. The URL's then lead us to create routes, and the routes lead us to create controllers. The cucumber scenarios also drive out any expectations we may have on any models, which the controller will usually set as instance variables.

Once we know we need a particular controller, we jump in to specify the controller, and the detailed behavior we expect there. Fleshing out the controller may drive out any additional functionality needed on the model. Finally, we spec out the model. At this point, we work through any additional functionality in the cucumber scenario. Once all scenarios and specs are passing, and we can't think of any more to write, we're done.

Obviously, my description is quite simplified. There is alot of subtlety here. That's why I suggested that I send some links to some good videos online, which talk about outside in development, specification, integration tests, and design in general. My friend Tom had done something similar earlier this year.

Here is my list, in suggested viewing order. The first is fairly concrete, and then they get more abstract and theoretical.

  1. Joseph Wilk's Working Outside-in with Cucumber and RSpec
  2. J.B. Rainsbergers Integration Tests are a Scam
  3. Michael Feathers' The Deep Synergy Between Testability and Good Design

SECOND

On the way home, I saw that my coworker Mike tweeted about a blog post he wrote today. This struck a chord with me, especially when I got to the end. The entire article rings true in the Enterprise Java space as it does in .NET. Then he clinched it with this:

If I do ever go back to working on a .NET project, I'll bring a lot of new knowledge and ideas that will likely make that a more enjoyable experience.

Over the last few months, I've been having tremendous amounts of fun developing with Cucumber, RSpec and Rails. There seems to be a huge sweet spot, where it's very easy to get into the flow. You start writing the scenarios and specifications, and the application starts to write itself.

I had practiced acceptance testing and unit testing in the java world, and it was alot of hard work! With these tools, it's great fun, and it practically does the work for you. There is still alot of thinking involved, but it is much more focused on the problem domain.

THIRD

Andy talked about a powerful technique to write and grow your specs. In addition, he talks about how the developer specifications, when printed up pretty, made great documentation for a non-technical client. Consider how much stronger his collaboration was because he could share his specifications with his client. Shared language and shared understanding lead to better communication and increased collaboration.

FINALLY

Syntactically, the Ruby language is not very large. You can start reading ruby code very quickly. And, you can read most any ruby code that you want. As an interpreted language, all libraries are shipped in very readable files. In addition, the community seems very open to keeping things open and readable. I have yet to see any library that is obfuscated.

Which brings us to Colin, and his tweet at the end of the day:

pro-tip: every week read up on a new class in the #ruby stdlib. i don't think enough people know what's available to them.

You could wield alot of power when you are given the chance to understand every piece of every library that you are using. This power comes in the form of understanding what you're using.

TAKEAWAY

Learn powerful tools and techniques. Read as much code as you can. Understand the guts of what you're working with. Go out and have fun developing!!!

Your days will be alot more enjoyable, and your work will be alot more professional.

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