Exploration Through Example

Example-driven development, Agile testing, context-driven testing, Agile programming, Ruby, and other things of interest to Brian Marick

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Fri, 19 Dec 2003

Agile Project Management with Scrum

I'm reading a prepublication copy of Ken Schwaber's Agile Project Management with Scrum. It rocks. Stories of real projects, just like I like. Watch for it.

## Posted at 17:57 in category /agile [permalink] [top]

Open source automated test tools written in Java

Carlos E. Perez has a nice list of tools.

## Posted at 10:08 in category /misc [permalink] [top]

Do the right thing

Joe Bergin's Do the Right Thing pattern. (Warning: humor.)

## Posted at 10:02 in category /misc [permalink] [top]

Decorating programmer tests

[Updated to get Alan Green's name right.]

Charles Miller talks about decorating programmer tests to check for things like resource leaks. Alan Green chimes in. I met Charles Simonyi briefly on Tuesday and, weirdly enough, he had the same idea (with an aspect-ish flavor).

A clever idea, plus it's a trigger for me to go meta. On the airplane Saturday, I highlighted this sentence from Latour and Woolgar's Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts:

... the solidity of this object... was constituted by the steady accumulation of techniques (p. 127 of the 2nd edition, 1986).

The object in question was Thyrotropin Releasing Factor (TRF), which is something you have inside you. Latour and Woolgar give a story of how TRF went from being a name given to something hypothetically present in one kind of unpurified glop to, specifically, Pyro-Glu-His-Pro-NH₂.

Now, you might say that TRF was always a solid object - that Pyro-Glu-His-Pro-NH₂ always existed, whether or not any person knew of it. Fine. But with respect to people, TRF didn't exist until the end of an enormous and time-consuming effort that yielded both a formula and, eventually, a Nobel prize. After that effort, other researchers could depend on that structure with unreflective certainty, and manufacturers could manufacture TRF in bulk rather than extracting minute quantities from slaughtered sheep.

Latour and Woolgar say that the sheer mass of diverse techniques applied - mass spectrometry, skilled technicians performing bioassays, computer algorithms, techniques for writing persuasive papers, and so forth - made TRF into a solid object people can use for their purposes.

I don't particularly care about TRF. I read this kind of stuff to give me ideas about what I do. And part of what I do is help construct facts.

You see, people make things in the world. Some of those things are very concrete: bridges. Some of them are very abstract: democracy. Both kinds of things have power in the world, and both are solid: the idea of democracy is as resistant to attack as the Golden Gate Bridge is to weather and tides.

I can interpret Latour and Woolgar as implying that democracy is not just an idea; rather, it's built from the techniques used to implement it. Robert's Rules of Order make parliamentary democracy. They're not merely one set of adornments around its unchanging essence.

Similarly, object-oriented programming is not just programming with languages that provide inheritance, polymorphism, and encapsulation. It's built from how people use those languages - from design patterns, from CRC cards, from old talk about finding objects by underlining the nouns in a problem description, from even older practices of using OO languages for simulation, from the push toward ever-more rapid iteration and feedback, from allowing exceptions to be stashable objects rather than transient stack transfers, and so forth. All these things - some of which don't seem in any way a part of any abstract essence of OO - nevertheless make up the solid notion we share.

What postings like Charles's and Alan's signify to me is that programmer testing is rapidly solifying into a new fact in the world. For the first time, it's approaching the reality of the Golden Gate Bridge. Weird, huh? And hope-making.

## Posted at 06:45 in category /testing [permalink] [top]