NetInverse Developers Blog

July 20, 2009
Category: Agile — Tags: , , — admin @ 11:06 pm

Net Objectives delivers Public Courses in all best practices of effective software development. Delivered in convenient, central locations, our courses are designed to help you and your team maximize the business value returned from your engineering efforts in software development and maintenance.

Net Objectives Public Courses are delivered throughout the country. Use the below schedule to sort Courses by Course Name, Date, City or State.

http://www.netobjectives.com/courses/

June 20, 2009
Category: .Net, Agile — Tags: , , — admin @ 12:11 am

Pragmatic programmers use feedback to drive their development and personal processes. The most valuable feedback you can get while coding comes from unit testing. Now in it’s second edition, Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit, 2nd Ed. will show you how to do software unit testing, of course, but more importantly will show you what to test.

About this book

New for the Second Edition:

  • Updated for NUnit 2.4 (C#, .NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, and Mono)
  • More NUnit assert methods
  • New String and Collection assertion support
  • Better support for multiple-platform development (Mono and .NET)
  • Higher-level setup and teardown fixtures
  • …and more!

Without good tests in place, coding can become a frustrating game of “whack-a-mole.” That’s the carnival game where the player strikes at a mechanical mole; it retreats and another mole pops up on the opposite side of the field. The moles pop up and down so fast that you end up flailing your mallet helplessly as the moles continue to pop up where you least expect them. You need automated testing and regression testing to keep the moles from popping up.

You don’t test a bridge by driving a single car over it right down the middle lane on a clear, calm day. Yet many programmers approach testing that same way—one pass right down the middle and they call it “tested.” Pragmatic programmers can do better than that!

With this book, you will:

  • Write better code, faster
  • Discover the best hiding places where C# bugs breed
  • Learn how to think of all the things that could go wrong
  • Test pieces of code without using the whole .NET project
  • Use NUnit to simplify your C# test code
  • Test effectively with the whole team

Real software unit testing will make your life easier. It will make your software design and architecture better and drastically reduce the amount of time you spend debugging you .NET code.

June 7, 2009
Category: Agile — Tags: , — admin @ 9:20 pm

Hi, I’ve got some exciting news for everyone as most of this announcement involves resources or courses available on line.
We also have free events on both sides of the country. I’ve written several blogs recently, as well as done a podcast, so
some good information no matter where you are. We’re also offering another Lean Online course in another few weeks which, of
course, is also available everywhere. In Bellevue, we’re offering a new course which incorporates Lean practices into our Scrum Master
course – we call it Lean Scrum Master Certification by Net Objectives. While this is being offered in Bellevue, we’d love to offer it elsewhere
if there is enough interest. We also have free events in Washington, DC, Hampton Roads, VA, and Bellevue, WA, as well as upcoming courses
in both Washington and South Carolina. In addition to all of this, I’ve started a fun new thing based on Janice Hagy’s Indexed concept.
Finally, we have some great discounts on SQE’s Better Software Conference coming up next week – please look for us if you’re there as several of us will be.

Recent Blogs and a podcast
Since the Lean Kanban conference in Miami, I’ve had a significant number of insights into how to incorporate Lean into Agile methods as well as increased my understanding of why Scrum teams have difficulties. I discuss many of these on our blog page. The most recent blogs and podcasts are:

  • What is the Difference Between First Generation Agile (XP/Scrum) and Lean/Kanban?
  • Redefining Lean (a podcast)
  • Challenging Why (not if) Scrum Fails
  • Lean Kanban 2009 – Wow!

If you want to learn more about Lean or if you are having troubles getting Scrum to scale, you should find these of interest.

Second offering of Lean On-Line Course June 29-August 3
We got a lot of positive feedback about our Lean-Online Course we recently offered. We are offering it again at for only $395 ($345 if you register by June 10th and an even bigger discount if you had registered for the first one but weren’t able to attend – see the Yahoo discussion group for details). This includes a CD with all of the sessions (sent to you after the course) plus additional material that will be sent to you after the course (add $20 if outside of the United States). More and more people are recognizing that an understanding of Lean principles is essential if you want to make your enterprise agile. Scaling Agility can be difficult. It is important to start out with a vision for the entire organization that you want to become more effective. Lean provides this understanding.

New Course Lean Scrum Master Certification by Net Objectives in Bellevue, July 27th
We’ve been doing Scrum training (team, Scrum Master and Product Owner) for almost 9 years now. All of these courses have been done within the context of Lean, providing a better base for companies doing Scrum across more than just a couple of teams. This new course incorporates Lean practices of setting up a work-flow, directly managing work-in-process, coordinating development and test groups as well giving insights into how to coordinate multiple teams. This approach represents a significant advance of Scrum – having it both work within the context of Lean and now taking advantage of Lean practices to kick-start your teams’ progress. If your company is having difficulties getting started with Scrum, see how an integration of Lean with Scrum can accelerate the process.

This course is open to those who already have taken one of our Scrum courses (Implementing Scrum for your Team or Scrum Master Certification), a Scrum Alliance CSM course, or have been practicing Scrum for 6 months. Bottom line - you must already understand Scrum prior to attending. This is one reason our Scrum training is tops. It is unfortunate that most people attending a Scrum Alliance CSM course are going there to learn what Scrum is. This makes it difficult to cover what being a Scrum Master is as well. This course requires knowing Scrum so the full day can be focused on the Scrum Master role. Ron Jeffries, a senior CST of the Scrum Alliance agrees that more than two days of training is needed when he explains why he offers 3-day Scrum courses – “The traditional CSM course is only two days. That’s not enough time to cover the things a ScrumMaster needs to know to help their team be successful.” This course represents that necessary, third day.

Other Courses in Bellevue, WA and Columbia, SC
Implementing Lean-Agile for Your Team, Columbia, SC, June 9-10. Learn how to do Scrum within the context of Lean principles. We’re offering this course at a one-time high discount from our normal pricing to introduce ourselves into the area.

Design Patterns for Agile Developers, Bellevue, WA, July 7-9. Improve your programming skills and learn to design sustainable code in an Agile environment. Taught by the award winning author of Emergent Design – Scott Bain.

Free events around the States
The Washington, DC Lean-Agile Open, the afternoon of June 5. Business track on Enterprise Driven Software Development and Technical track on Acceptance Test-Driven Development followed by an open space to discuss your issues with our experts.

The Hampton Roads, VA, Lean-Agile Open, the afternoon of June 22. Business track on Enterprise Driven Software Development and Technical track on Acceptance Test-Driven Development followed by an open space to discuss your issues with our experts.

Sustainable Test-Driven Development, evening of July 1, Bellevue, WA. Learn what Test-Driven Development is and why it is important to do it.

The Daily Index
This is just a new fun way of communicating. Check it out.

SQE’s Better Software Conference Next week in Las Vegas!
We have a variety of discounts available - some too good to mention in a public email (really!). If you have an interest in attending, please send an email to mike.shalloway@netobjectives.com Please make sure you to mention the company you work for.

I hope you found this informative. Please let me know if there is anything we can do to help you.

Alan Shalloway
CEO, Sr. Consultant
Net Objectives. Achieving Enterprise Agility
425-269-8991

May 10, 2009
Category: Agile, Architecture, Design Pattern — Tags: — admin @ 8:59 pm
  1. On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules – David Parnas
  2. A Note On Distributed Computing – Jim Waldo, Geoff Wyant, Ann Wollrath, Sam Kendall
  3. The Next 700 Programming Languages – P. J. Landin
  4. Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? – John Backus
  5. Reflections on Trusting Trust – Ken Thompson
  6. Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big – Richard Gabriel
  7. An experimental evaluation of the assumption of independence in multiversion programming – John Knight and Nancy Leveson
  8. Arguments and Results – James Noble
  9. A Laboratory For Teaching Object-Oriented Thinking – Kent Beck, Ward Cunningham
  10. Programming as an Experience: the inspiration for Self – David Ungar, Randall B. Smith

by Michael Feathers. You can read the original post here.

April 26, 2009
Category: Agile, Architecture — Tags: — admin @ 11:47 am
  • Componentization
  • Better test infrastructure and tools
  • Improved logging and error models
  • Error reporting and automated updates, including hot patching
April 2, 2009
Category: Agile — Tags: — admin @ 7:11 pm

 XP is a lightweight but disciplined approach to software development that has testing and quality at its core.

XP is based on four values: communication, simplicity, feedback, and courage.

Twelve practices comprise the rules of XP:

  • Onsite customer
  • Pair programming
  • Coding standards
  • Metaphor
  • Simple design
  • Refactoring
  • Testing
  • Continuous integration
  • Small releases
  • Planning game
  • Collective code ownership
  • Sustainable pace

XP solves three major testing and quality assurance problems:

  • Unit and integration bugs during system and acceptance testing
  • Lack of requirement from which to develop tests
  • Large gaps between customer expectations and delivered product

- Testing Extreme Programming (Crispin House)

XP tools:
- Continuous Integration for .NET: Draco.NET is a Windows service application designed to facilitate continuous integration.

- Fit, FitNesse, and Canoo Web Test, etc.

Category: Agile — Tags: , — admin @ 7:07 pm

Ron Jeffries’ site www.xprogramming.com

Harry Robinson’s web site http://www.geocities.com/model_based_testing/ has a lot of interesting information on testing, although generally more on system/integration/acceptance testing.

March 9, 2009
Category: Agile — Tags: — admin @ 7:25 pm

Lean Software Development - An Agile Toolkit By Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck

This book contains seven chapters devoted to seven lean principles and thinking tools for translating each principle into agile practices.

  1. Eliminate waste. Waste is anything that does not add value to a product, value as perceived by the customer.
  2. Amplify learning. Development is an exercise in discovery. Take your most difficult problem and devise a way to increase feedback. Start iterations with a negotiation session between customers and developers. Post a progress chart for your current project in a common area so the team can see what needs to be done and everyone can see the project is converging. Find your toughest outstanding development problem and have the development team come up with three options on how to solve it. Instead of choosing one of the solutions, have the team explore all three options at the same time.
  3. Decide as late as possible. Development practices that provide for late decision making are effective in domains that involve uncertainty, because they provide any options-based approach.
  4. Deliver as fast as possible.
  5. Empower the team.
  6. Build integrity.
  7. See the whole. Finding and removing the limits of growth. Avoid the pattern called “Shifting the burden”. Ask “five whys” to counter the tendency to the burden to symptoms rather than addressing the root cause of a problem. Avoid “Suboptimization”. Local management tends to create local measuremens of performance. These local measurements often create systemwide effects that decrease overall performance.

©2009 NetInverse. All rights reserved. Powered by WordPress