ALT.NET Seattle

Thought I should write up the sessions that I most enjoyed at ALT.NET Seattle, because otherwise I'll forget it all.

Jeremy Miller had a superb session on how he's managed to maintain Structure Map over multiple years, and how focusing on good OOD made it very easy to maintain the code base. Very enjoyable and look forward to reading more about what it's taught him about writing tests that support you well when you do big refactoring/redesign. The best bit was undoubtedly when he was asked what IoC he uses, superb.

Scott Bellware did a session on the context/specification style of BDD which was interesting and reminded me to read his Code magazine article. I like the context/specification approach and it kinda seems like the whole story/scenario based approach has (temporarily?) stalled in the .NET world so it was good to hear about how Scott makes context/specification work. I need to look more about how to write good acceptance tests though because I've never been happy with the results.

Greg Young and others contributed to and organized several excellent session future architectures, videos of two of them are up here and here.

There was also a good discussion of messaging at a .NET scalability session, Dru Sellers providing the expertise and it left me wanting to try out Mass Transit.

There were plenty of other good sessions with interesint contributions, in many cases though I wasn't sure who was contributing (no name tags, argh) so I don't know where to go for more info.

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BDD Discussion

BDD Divergence

The BDD Acceptance Testing thread over at the BDD forum is showing up what I consider to be the big problem in BDD at the minute, mixed messages.

On one side you have an approach that uses a context and specification approach to apply BDD style tests to all levels of specification, this is the approach where you might have a class called When_my_account_is_declined containing a specification called A_notification_is_sent_to_interested_parties. In my view this style is useful, I've been using it for unit testing and I like it a lot. Having said that I'm not intending to take a dump of the context/specification names for use by non-programmers in the team (e.g. domain experts) because a lot of the specifications will be too low level or technology focused. So far I'm primarily using this style to get nice readable specifications for use by the developers, so as a different style of TDD.

On the other side is the story/scenario driven approach that Dan North is pushing for, he also describes why he likes to separate these tests from classical programmer tests and the part they play in your process.

I personally think that you can use the two approaches together if you want to, using the given/when/then approach for acceptance tests and context/specification (or just normal TDD) for all other tests (including unit tests). You can of course use the context/specification style for the acceptance tests and dump given/when/then. Whether this is a good idea depends on whether the benefits Dan's approach brings (such as improving communication with non-programmers in the team) justify the effort of using the given/when/then style and to be honest I haven't used his style enough yet to have a strong view on it.

Are we automating Stories or Scenarios

Two interesting points that Dan makes in the acceptance testing thread are:

"As you quite rightly said, you can express any scenario in just a regular
example, or xunit test case."

..and..

"The scenario runner (not story runner - you don't run stories)"

He is clarifying that we run scenarios not stories. What is a scenario in this context, Scott gives a good definition in the BDD terminology thread:

"A scenario is a way to express acceptance criteria using an example-
driven approach.  A scenario can express more than one criteria if
needed. "

The fact that you automate scenarios rather than acceptance tests is a good point to make.

Terminology

In the discussions on BDD we all seem to use consistent terminology, however the BDD terminology thread at the BDD forum is a good starting point to getting some consistency (which can only improve the discussion).

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Whale Watching

Just got back from a holiday in Vancouver and Seattle.

The highlight was a whale watching trip with Wild Whales Vancouver. We were lucky enough to see plenty of wildlife and in particular a pod of transient killer whales hunting a porpoise, apparently witnessing such a thing is quite rare and it was definitely a great experience. We haven't yet looked at our own pictures from the day but a research vessel that was nearby got some super pictures which are available here. My favourite is:

Definitely recommend whale watching and Wild Whales Vancouver. It was also interesting to hear about the issues affecting killer whales around Vancouver and to find out that Canada isn't actually quite as enlightened on environmental issues as people in Europe might expect.

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