I have just been on summer vacation on Naxos in Greece, and i brought along uncle Bob´s (Robert C. Martin) book “Clean Code” to read on the beach. A couple weeks earlier i had been to NDC 2009 listening to him talk about what makes a developer or programmer a professional. This, the book  and all the other great sessions on code quality and agile development  got me thinking – what statement can i make as a programmer, developer and software engineer to show the world “I am a professional!” and what would be simple enough to not be constraining?

So, between the great door of Naxos and the mountain of Zeus i wrote down 6 simple guidelines in what i call “The agile developer´s manifesto“. These guidelines will help me improve myself as a developer, software engineer and solution architect.

These are guidelines, not rules that yield punishment if “broken”. I´ll try to follow them in my daily routine and also try to help others see the benefit of them. Continue Reading

Morning glory

Day two of NDC begins as a rainy day, but i am looking forward to getting out to Telenor Arena, Today the topics starts with issues i really care about – Test Driven Development and Unit Testing of code.

It´s a proven, working concept that increases code quality and it saves you a whole lot of money. Something that should make the TDD argument extremely easy to sell to your manager. Added benefit here is that your customer will find less errors and bugs, this makes them happy and more prone to ask for more functionality and upgrades. 

Understanding Test Driven Development with Roy Osherove

This was a level 100 session so it was a basic intro to unit testing and TDD. If you are new to unit testing and TDD principles you should have been there. Some advice on your way as a happier coder; You should learn unit testing first, and when you know how to write tests and use unit testing frameworks you start using Test Driven Development as a development method. This makes it a lot easier for you as a developer. Also, only write tests for public methods that contain logic. Code that has public accessors and contains if statements, switches and loops etc, there is no value in testing the rest in a unit test. Continue Reading

The NDC 2009 starts today and in lack of mobile technology content i have decided to go for more general topics than tech specific sessions.

Conference introduction

The conference opens at 8am with registration, and you have a hour  to roam around before everything starts. Im looking at the exhibitions at Telenor Arena and must give kudos to the site, I like this place a lot better than last year at the SAS hotel.

At 8:45 the conference kicks off with a lot of noise, Hip  Hop music and  a short introduction by the director of Programutvikling AS. She introduces Robert C. Martin for his keynote, that starts with a lesson on biology and history and makes the transition over to software development and testing.

This speak should be force fed to mangers, not developers – it is not developers that are responsible for the lack of testing in the software industry – it is the mangers that does not for some unknown reason see the value in it. But then again, if we as developers just did it, just included the time it takes to do the tests in our estimates we just might get it to work, and your manager can give their own shoulder a pad and say that they thought their developers well.. Continue Reading