Build information radiators are useful for improving the visibility of the state of the build – bright green if it’s good, or bright red if it’s broken. On our current project we’ve been trying to assemble all the hardware to get some lava lamps going, but in the meantime we’re using a very old PC and its tiny CRT monitor to glow bright green or red.

A problem we had was the Power Options settings turns off the monitor after 20 minutes of (in)activity and it’s been too difficult to get Administrator privileges for the machine. Although not necessarily the most ideal solution, the most amenable one for Friday was a small program that moves the mouse cursor every the minutes. Get the results here if you want.

Usage:

java -cp MouseMover.jar <number of minutes each time you want the mouse moved>

One of the benefits you get with consulting is that you get to see a variety of applications, processes, and in agile projects, different build pipelines. I take the developer loop very seriously, because how quickly you can get feedback determines how quickly you get serious things done. Different testing strategies are an important way of improving the amounts of feedback (as long as you can still write meaningful tests). Another technique is the ease with which you can configure various libraries, integration points and environments. Even splitting the build into various stages where failing earlier is more appropriate can help you get better feedback.

The ultimate feedback loop I’ve seen in Java is the “change-compile-run test” loop. Anything more and you will decrease your feedback cycle and adversely affect how fast you can develop. Anything less than this is unacceptable – skipping the “run test” stage doesn’t do anything to validate that what you wrote actually works. On a side note, in an interpreted language, the loop is even tighter, simply being “change-run test”.

J2EE’s “Enterprise” Feedback Loop
I’ve worked on numerous J2EE systems that were all business successes. As a developer though, it still makes me cringe thinking about the feedback loop, and how long it takes to make a change to a class, or one of many, many XML files, jar up something several times, and then actually test it.

Optimising Your Build Loop
Visualising your build process is an excellent way of seeing exactly how many hurdles you have to go through to get any decent feedback. Even better is trying to work out which things you *really* need in a build and removing anything that just doesn’t add any value. I try to aim for the simplest and fastest feedback that you can get using the above diagrams as the ultimate goal. Give it a go!

I started at a new client yesterday, and we had a great conversation on my thoughts about working overtime. Anyone who has worked with me in the past knows that as a principle, I heavily dislike working overtime. I think I provided some pretty good reasons and thought I’d write about it.

I am a big believer in the “Sustainable Pace” concept because I think that quality software development is a limited resource. Even though I dislike working long hours, they’re inevitable because of various reasons, and when I’ve worked long hours, and witnessed other working long hours, I’ve observed developers get tired, and when they get tired, they get sloppy. For a project that will be running for a long time, you really don’t want that.

The reason I think of it as a limited resource is because if you have ever done solid software development, you will find it requires constant judgement, thinking and in general just solving problems and puzzles all day. It requires a large number of micro decisions and is a tiring exercise with a physical limit for how well you can sustain this before quality starts to suffer. Imagine playing sudoku all day long and see how long it is before your brain starts to tire (and I just did that with the amount of flying I recently went through!)

Of course some people handle this differently. Some developers I know, prefer to spread out this thinking with various breaks of checking email, surfing the web, etc. I’ve heard of stories where some developers will do these bursts in a series of several consecutive long days, but have lots of down time in between. These developers should never be confused with developers who are just lazy and continually check email, surf the web, or better yet “work from home”. I also think that the latter developers have no pride in their work and should not be in our industry.

I do agree that in some circumstances, it is important to be able to tap into “extra hours” and that it should be exceptional circumstances. The illusion that needs dispelling is that there are no “extra hours”, and that at some point, developers will need to rest and to be effective.

I suggest to business people who I’ve worked with that it is better to maximise the value you can get out of the limited resource, instead of trying to mine more of the resource. Oh, and did I mention that maximising business value is what agile is about?

Even though I was accepted for Agile India last year, I wasn’t able to make it because of extraneous circumstances. I found out last weekend that I have just been accepted to present a TDD Swing Workshop at XP 2006 to be held in Finland. Woo hoo!

1. Initial – You don’t test or manually test in an ad hoc manner
2. Repeatable – You start building test suite(s) that can be run repeatably
3. Defined – You automate your test suites and run them in a continuous integration environment
4. Managed – You start observing metrics from the tests such as how good the coverage is, how long it takes to run and how difficult they may be to write
5. Optimising – You start to make changes to your code to make it easier to test, and you use the tests to highlight areas that need refactoring or a redesign. You start running Test Driven Development or Behaviour Driven Development to enhance the testability of your code.

After applying the CMM to way I execute testing, I find it interesting that the practices that emerged from the agile community are heavily biased towards the higher end of the CMM. There’s definitely a message here.

Disclaimer: This list was created by myself and does not reflect any official source associated with the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). It was written by me in terms of thinking of how I have seen testing executed and then trying to describe it in terms of the CMM.