Agile Acceptance Testing with Fit/Fitnesse

Tomorrow evening, I will be attending a session about agile acceptance testing with FIT organised by Agile Belgium. The session is hosted at our office at IHC in Oostkamp and my colleague Pascal is one of the presenters.

Based on what I’ve seen thus far, my expectations are high!!!

If you’re interested in this topic and want to join us, there are  still some seats left. Don’t forget your laptop for this hands-on session!

More info and subscription @ http://agilefun.com/?p=244

See you there!

Career switch

Most of you might already know it, but in case you didn’t: one month ago – inspite the economic situation – I left Compuware looking for a new challenge, closer to home. Since it’s been a month already – time flies when you’re having fun – I thought this was as good a moment as any other to give the situation some thought and inform everyone who cares

Should you add comments on readable, communicative code?

Davy Brion has put some code online to challenge his readers. And guess what… I’m a reader and I like challenges!

 ”Do you truly understand this code?” is the question asked. Well I guess (and hope) I do, I left him my best guess in the comments, ‘guessing’ which part of his code he’s referring to as ‘non-obvious’.

The real question he’s asking is: should this code have comments?
Some think it should, others would advise: if the code is readable and communicative, it doesn’t need comments to explain.

My 2 cents?

1. If you’re asking people to look for the non-obvious solution you applied, I’d say: comment this, it’s not obvious.
2. In general, I’d say most readable and communicative code deserves some useful comments.
   Why? Because not everyone share the same knowledge. What you think of as obvious, readable, communicative may not be the case for any other developer. And this isn’t necessarily related to knowledge, smarts, …
   Guess what: most twists your mind makes while solving an issue might look obvious to you afterwards, but they almost never are if you didn’t follow the same path to the solution.

What’s your take on the comment/don’t comment question?

Did I cause these tests to fail?

This might be the first question that pops to your mind when some of the unit tests in your solution fail. The second thing will probably be: it can’t have been me, I didn’t change anything that should make these tests fail! Sounds familiar? How can you check this and know for sure it wasn’t you?

WPF has issues too

As I mentioned earlier, Juval Löwy pointed out the issues that prevent WCF from being perfect in his WCF master class. And, frankly, I keep struggling with the same feelings regarding to WPF. There are quite some things that have been annoying me for quite some time now, but there’s not always an easy way to get around them (that I know of). Let’s look at some of my annoyances.

I Flidge

When I was typing my tagged post I had a hard time finding a seventh fact, so I came up with a little experiment: the teaser link to Flidge. As I promised to explain later, here it comes.

Flidge is not the next Twitter, it’s not the next Flickr either. So what is it? Well, with Flidge it’s all about online advertising (promoting your site on the one hand and earning money by publishing ads on the other hand), so you could compare it to Google’s AdSense, but for me it has some advantages. It looks promising to me for several reasons, but I’ll give you the full story.

Since I already was planning on doing some experiments on my blog, I decided to tag all the posts with an Experiment tag. The teaser link was just the first thing that fitted those plans, so some of you might have seen the tag on that post and wondered why I did this.

So, what’s the plan?

WCF is broken, let’s fix it!

As you could read already on this blog, I attended the WCF master class organized @ Compuware with high expectations and I must say: Juval Löwy certainly didn’t disappoint! Quite on the contrary! Here comes my summary of the most intense training week of my life!

The evolution of expectations

I bet you all know this one: Imagine there is something you’d really want – this could be anything – but you really really want it. It is the sole thing that would make you happy. What happens the day you get it? You know? I’ll tell you, you’ll be happy, as you should be.

But after a while, that feeling goes away and eventually you’ll end up wanting something more, better, newer, faster. Not immediately, no, the very instant you get what you want, you’re happy, as you should be, remember? But after some days, weeks, months or so – depending on the person, subject, cost, …, you’ll see your expectations evolve. Why?

Tagged!

As if he thinks I don’t have enough posts already considering the short life of my blog, Pieter has tagged me…

Let’s start off by mentioning the rules:

•  Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog. passed
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some weird. passed
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs. FAILED
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter FAILED

I won’t be complying to the last two rules, because I don’t like chain mails and don’t forward those either
Still, I have no problem sharing 7 facts about myself, that some of you might not know yet, so here they are… And I’ve kept the best for last…

WCF Master class

Pieter’s managed to do it again! He got Juval Löwy of IDesign to come give another Master Class at Compuware Belgium. After the Architect Master Class last year, this year Juval will deliver the WCF Master Class and I’ll be attending! I’m not quite sure of what to expect, but looking at the schedule for next week I can say a lot! I’ve always thought there was more to WCF than those good old [ServiceContract], [DataContract], [DataMember], … attributes. I guess after this week I’ll be pretty sure…