XPDay Review

On Thursday and Friday of last week I showed up at XPDay, and attended some cool sessions including:

Nat Pryce on TDD of async code: http://www.natpryce.com/articles/000755.html

Matt Wynne on Lean Engineering: http://blog.mattwynne.net/2008/12/14/slides-from-xp-day-talk/

Had some interesting discussions with some cool people including:

http://gojko.net/tag/xpday08/

So, I was interested in Gojko Anzic's open space session on the new Fitnesse SLIM implemenation. It looks like it's much, much easier to wrap domain objects instead of creating fixture classes for testing. It's not quite ready yet, but I'm looking forward to a stable release.

There was also an interesting keynote from Marc Baker of LeanUK.org (http://www.leanuk.org/pages/about_team_marc_baker.htm) on his experiences of introducing lean principles into the NHS.

Test and Test Again

There has been some discussion of the application of agile principles including test driven development in the office recently. Having been working on a highly concurrent, scalable SIP application server my feet are firmly in the test first, test often camp.

Our testing strategy includes:

* unit testing, usually using mocks and dependency injection
* acceptance testing, using FitNesse
* robustness testing, using custom scenario handlers
* performance testing

These practices are dependent on the type of project, but we've found that although unit testing is done before the functional code is written, the other tests are usually written afterwards. I like to think that acceptance tests demonstrate completed user stories and robustness tests exercise common scenarios, concurrently.

A robust application comes with time, but through concurrent testing, issues can be drawn out earlier and the confidence you have in your application grows.