This blogpost is a Norwegian language tribute to one of my home city’s great poets Med takk til Joachim Nielsen Ta en titt inn på skjermen din æ’kke testen grønn Det var mye værre her om da’n da var alle tester røde Skulle vært her i forrige uke, da hadde byggserver’n stopp Alt jeg tenker på er test...

The last couple of months have been full speed and not much time to reflect and write. The fact that we’re pair programming on the team gives me less time to think about great blog subjects. As an architect, it’s hard to find enough time to complete a meaningful unit of work without doing the dreade...

På dagens møte i IASA Oslo fremsatte jeg påstanden at vi trenger en “vær-varsom plakat” for arkitekten. Spesielt fokuserte jeg på virksomhetsarkitektens rolle og risiko. I diskusjonen etterpå kom vi inn på mange av aspektene og det var mange veldig gode forslag der jeg ikke fikk notert meg alt, så j...

In this second podcast in the Oslo Developer Conversation series, I talk with Robert Martin about FitNesse. We discuss the origins of FitNesse and it’s relationship with Fit, the relationship between acceptance tests in FitNesse and unit tests and the new Slim-tables in FitNesse. See the (English la...

This is a test case from my current project: Scenario: Finish gathering information Given I have an open case And the case has a task "gather information from X" And the case has a task "gather information from Y" When the user confirms that task "gather information from X" is completed And the user...

Doing the Code Dojo at Oslo XP meetup last Monday, I realized a new concept that I’ve been using unconsciously for a while: I only add to the structure of my system when I have a test that cannot be satisfied by the current design. The rules of test-driven development tells me to wait to create a mo...

Agile development is easy to understand and hard to do. One of the hardest things to do is to base plans and actions on value instead of effort. An article by Alistair Cockburn includes a story that illustrates the point: A boy is behind on his German language home work. He now has to read ten stori...

My friends at ProgramUtvikling just published the first PodCast in the series Oslo Developer Conversations. In this PodCast, yours truly interviews Uncle Bob about software craftsmanship. The podcast is still only available as video, but audio will come shortly. I had a great time doing this intervi...

I’ve all but stopped using mock objects in my tests. The reason is that mocking have had a detrimental effect on the design of my systems. I’ve often ended up having the mocks trick me into adding a needless layer of indirection that does nothing except delegate to the next layer, just to satisfy th...

The hard choice between duplication, paralysis and chaos A common programmer credo is “Don’t Repeat Yourself” (Pragmatic Programmer) or “Once and only once” (Extreme Programming). Like all credos, we risk following it even when it is not appropriate. The larger truth is that we have choice between t...

The following is a trick I don’t use very often, but when I do need it, it comes in very handy. It’s a trick that many developers aren’t aware of, even though it’s been possible to do with JUnit at least since version 3. Sometimes you want to have a lot of tests that are almost the same, but that co...

If you ever talk to a group of people, you know that the art of presentation is one that requires a lifetime to master. But there are some dirt simple things you can do that will have a positive impact on your presentations. Here is my list of low hanging fruit for presenters: If you’re using a comp...

[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“165” caption=“Unstructured picture”][/caption] I recently started on a new project. Looking over the code base, I saw the familiar structure of many projects: Definitions of classes goes here, persistence logic goes over there, interfaces to the persistence lo...

“The service went down because another service running on the same application server went down.” “You can’t use the improved version of your programming language because you’re running on the same application server as some old applications.” “We can’t help you deploy your application on the applic...

Have you ever looked at a list of compiler warnings the length of an essay on bad coding and thought to yourself: “You know, I really should do something about that… but I don’t have time just now”? On the other hand, have you ever looked at a lone warning that just appeared in a compilation and jus...

Top five signs that you might not be working on an agile project: Your iterations do not produce anything that could be put into production You’re not testing your work You tasks are called “code the UI for the foo”, “update the bar component” and “test the work done in the previous iteration” Your ...

I’ve been part of the group organizing the Norwegian language, lightning talks based conference Smidig the last two years. This Norwegian language article describes the essential guidelines to giving a short presentation. En god lyntale kan ha enda større påvirkning enn et godt foredrag, fordi lette...

I became a programmer so that I could spend time creating software by programming. I don’t want to waste my time managing low-quality code. Does your code work the first time your test it out? Mine certainly never does. So if I hand over the code to someone else, I’m sure to get a bug report back th...

The Norwegian computing association has released guidelines for contracts regarding agile projects. Wednesday, November 26th I will be part of a panel debating this work and the combination of agile and contracts. This Norwegian language blog post contains my introductory remarks for the debate. Kom...

Agile software development has learned about informative workplaces and stop-the-line quality management from lean manufacturing systems. Here are my implementations of it at my last project: All is well This video shows how our project looked when all is well. The large green light in the front sho...

Update Thanks to Alan Palmer for this trick that makes this whole post unnecessary: If you use !path {java.class.path} You get the classpath that fitnesse was called with, without the need for changing the fitnesse code. Regular readers of my blog may remember that I’ve researched how to get the cla...

This article is a repost of my comments to the question on how to implement hashCode and equals on stackoverflow There are some issues worth noticing if you’re implementing hashCode and equals for classes that are persisted using an Object-Relationship Mapper (ORM) like Hibernate. If you didn’t thin...

This is a rough Norwegian language translation of the article JKE Day 1: Toyota Kyushu - The Manufacturing Ballet by Kevin Meyer (improvements on the language are very welcome, comments on the contents should go to Kevin). The reproduction has been authorized by the author. Unlike the rest of my sit...

When I encounter a system that has already been in development or production for a while, the first sign of real trouble is always a dirty log. You know what I’m talking about. When clicking a single link on a normal flow on a web page results in a deluge of messages in the only log that the system ...

I’m going on the road again. This time it’s not far, just to Trondheim for a seminar for the Norwegian computer association that I will be giving together with Aslak Hellesøy on agile development and testing. This will be similar to our line-up at JavaZone: Aslak will cover “how to make the correct ...

The alumni organization from my old university is arranging a debate about open source, and I’ll be moderating. The debate will be next Wednesday at Scotsman in downtown Oslo. There will be a four person panel, with two skeptics and two open source fans. So far, the panel looks as follows: Heidi Arn...

The Norwegian Agile User Group conference, Smidig 2008 was on Thursday and Friday. Both days started with three hour sessions of Lightning Talks, followed by three hours of open space work groups after lunch. We have been very happy with the format. The lightning talks give people food for thought. ...

The videos from JavaZone are up. Here’s my talk about Extending Continuous Integration, which talks about how I automatically run system level integration tests after every build.

In the middle of changing jobs, I have also been quite busy with the last minute preparations for the Smidig 2008 conference for the Oslo Agile user community (“smidig” being the closest Norwegian translation of “agile”). The conference be two days of lightning talks before lunch and open spaces aft...

It’s been a while since I promised to write top five unit testing tips, so I guess I should better start writing #2. As with my first example this one is based on a real-life story. Your code is worth nothing if it can’t be tested. Change your code to make it more testable. In my last project, we us...