We all sat round in a circle and listened to the wise old bird, and
much info was distributed amongst his followers.
Martin is over in blighty for a bit and popped into the geekspeak
pub on City Road today, which was cool. He was basically sharing
his own experiences...
- FIT - Ward Cunningham has created a funky looking test tool,
seems to merge the whole idea of documentation of your user
acceptance tests and the tests themselves. A simple idea, which looks
frighteningly powerful. Must unwrap the download and
have a play in the next day or two, as documentation that is as alive as
this looks like fun.
- Domain Driven Design [Eric Evans] - Martin has reviewed and done
the foward to this book, and is very excited about the content, i.e. Add it
to your Amazon wish list now...
- Mock Objects - a friendly exchange of viewpoints ensued between
orthogonal Joe and Martin over the use of Mock Objects in your TDD.
Martin prefering to use the real objects where possible (unless obvious
problems getting an instance of the dependant object in question), and
Joe likes the simplicity of a Mock. I guess the issue boils down to effectively
coding the expected behaviour from your Mock. Martin, quite
rightly, says that the Mock is tied to your implementation of the Object under
scrutiny, rather than focusing on the job in hand, that of testing the interface
and behaviour of that object.
- Asked (off the top of his head) which five tools for a Java project he
would take onto his desert island he came up with:
JUnit, IntelliJ/Eclipse, Ant, CVS and Cruise Control
- The most important aspect in coding for most of these guys seems to be
the physical setup of the coding environment, for example, your business
analyst accidentaly overhearing design decisions because he sits close to
the developers, and feeding back on any misdirection early and often, can
be a much bigger plus for a project than any tool/technique can.
It was another fun meet, nice to see some activity in London for a change,
even if it is mostly the Agile Community beating the drum until we all see sense.
Kudos to Martin for his time today, much respect...