Software that’s coded by monkeys
Is redundant and smells rather funky.
It’s cluttered, and fragile,
Nowhere near agile,
But it’s dope to a waterfall junkie.

I like it.

Fitting these pairing sessions into my schedule has been a bit trickier than I expected. A lot of recent difficulty has occurred due to people’s summer vacation schedules. Now that school is about to begin, I hope the frequency improves.

After some timetable negotiation, I was excited for the opportunity to spend a day at H********** (a company providing Healthcare-related services) in Ann Arbor, by invitation of Helene Gidley, Matt Long, and Brad Neighbors.

Upon arriving, I sat with Matt for a bit and he gave me an overview of the application his team was currently working on, showed me their story tracking system, and generally oriented me.

Shortly thereafter, many people arrived in the team area and conducted their standup, after which most of those people left. I found this a bit odd, but it’s hard to make any sort of judgements with such a small dataset.

My first pairing session was with with Shilpa Nalgonda. We worked on some java code dealing with surveys and worked through discussing and then writing an outer level Acceptance-style test to drive our inner loop of TDD. We discussed test method naming and mocks. The team was using EasyMock, which I’ve never used due to my dislike of the record/replay syntax. I prefer using Mockito, as I think it a more natural DSL.

I also got into a discussion with Lyudmilla Mishra and a couple other folks regarding their move over to start using a dependency manager (Ivy) for their builds. It was interesting to hear about some of the issues they had to consider from a healthcare/HIPPA perspective. I shared my experiences with Ivy and Maven (Maven, FTW!).

Brad, Helene & I went across the street to Grizzly Peak for some lunch, which was great as usual.

After lunch, it was more pairing with Shilpa, joined by Brad for a bit of tripling as well. Brad shared some of his experience using the Builder pattern for creating test objects. I had combined Fluent API and Builder in my mind, but Brad reminded me that they were actually different things for different purposes.

During this pairing we experienced the pain of the current dependency management setup firsthand, having to wait 5 minutes between changing a domain class and being able to use the changes in the service layer. Hopefully, this will get solved with the Ivy implementation.

We finished off the day with some informal retrospecting between myself, Brad, Lyuda, and Matt. I provided them with my observations of the day and a few suggestions (visible task boards, introduce WIP limit, develop end-to-end rather than in architectural layers). All in all, a great bunch of people who I’m sure I’ll be seeing around the Ann Arbor Area.

BillHighway “bills” themselves as a “Quickbooks for Communities”. One of my longtime friends works there, and I’ve had the privilege of getting to know their CIO over their past few years of impressive growth.

BillHighway is primarily a  VB.NET shop. I’ve never spent more than 5 minutes looking at .NET code, and the last time I used VB was about 12 years ago. It promised to be an eye-opening experience.

In the morning I paired with André LaMonde, a VB.NET hacker. We were working on standardizing some of the UI components to be in line with a new Look & Feel for their site. I was briefly thrown for a loop by the unfamiliarity of Visual Studio and strange syntax, but quickly recovered and was able to follow what was going on without too much trouble.

Unit testing is not regularly practiced by the team, so we had some good discussions about some of the challenges that dealing with legacy code bases brings about, and some strategies for integrating tests going forward. We struggled with NUnit for about 15 minutes, then bailed out and were able to get some tests up and running with the framework built into VS 2008.

In the afternoon, I paired with Meghan Letscher. She was very quick and was whizzing around Visual Studio like a pro. We worked on a similar task as in the morning, and delved into a bit of JavaScript & CSS to round things out. After struggling with some DLL permission problems and having fun with caspol.exe for a while, we were able to get some tests running and even managed to do a bit of TDD.

Overall, I had a great time, and picked up some 3l1t3 .NET skillz. I’m looking forward to the next stop!

I sat down with Ilya Sterin at a Caribou Coffee in Grosse Pointe, Michigan and we started off by discussing a few of the projects he was currently working on.

We decided to write some tests around code that he had written to post Facebook status updates. This led use Mocks for the Facebook API, and refactor some of the code to be more testable.

During this refactoring, Ilya brought up the question of whether we should favor writing testable code at the possible expense of simplicity. I think that writing testable code generally results in simpler code (not gold plating, etc, etc), but I replied that it’s only important to write testable code if you care if it works.

After lunch at a nearby Sushi bar we tackled a different project that had a lot of concurrency going on. Ilya has a lot of experience with java threading and he has an excellent handle on how it all hangs together. I learned quite a bit from him in this segment, include exposure to the Guice DI framework.

We were able to bring a couple consumer/producer classes under test. This again required some refactoring–mostly along SRP lines–and resulted in a simpler and cleaner design.

Overall, it was a great experience, and exactly what I hoped to get out of the pairing tour. I’m looking forward to my February date which is tentatively scheduled for next 2/12/2010. I’ll post more details when it’s confirmed.

a highly concurrent producer/consumer implementation for data messaging through numerous sources

Aaahh, legacy code testing and refactoring. One of my favorite pastimes I love it!

The Tour Calendar is now available for anyone interested.

The February and March dates are *almost* confirmed, so i’ll be announcing those shortly.

To start with, I’ll be spending 1 day per month pairing with individuals anywhere within about a 2 hour driving distance from Ann Arbor. (Yes, I realize this puts the top of Ohio in play as well. If you’re nice, maybe I’ll cross the border for you )

I’ll pair in any language, on any project. We can write code, write stories, write acceptance tests, you name it.

Goals

What am I trying to accomplish?

1. Enhance my own skills from hands on experience with other practitioners.
2. (Hopefully) enhance my partner’s skills.
3. Meet more like-minded folks throughout Michigan.
4. Inspire others who don’t have the availability for a full Corey-style tour to go out and grow themselves and the community.

Logistics

If you’d like to be on my tour, please contact me via email or twitter. If you need to get permission from your boss, I’m happy to talk to him/her or sign any corporate NDA’s that are required.

My current plan is to do this on Fridays, but I’m pretty flexible, so let me know what works for you.

I’ll put up a Google Calendar shortly with all the booked dates. (Update: Google Calendar is posted)

Thanks for your interest, and I hope to see you on my journey!

This morning, as I started using the new OS, I experienced the following issues:

• Dev tools not installed – easily solved by installing the XCode package off the DVD
• QuickSilver not working — solved by upgrading to SL version, and removing
  • ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver and
  • ~/Library/Preferences/com.blacktree.Quicksilver.plist
• MacRuby seems to be broken — seems like 0.5 is needed.
• Quicken 2007 needs Rosetta — quite a nice implementation, as SL automatically downloaded Rosetta and installed it.
• Electric Sheep 2.7b16 does not work — waiting for devs to update
• iStat not working — waiting for devs to update
• Xmarks not working — waiting for devs to update
• Growl has strange behavior — upgrade to v1.2b fixes it http://code.google.com/p/growl/downloads/list — final release should be available soon.
• Nambu not working — switching (permanently?) to Tweetie or TweetDeck
• Weird font problem in Firefox — some sites indicate a problem with 3rd party font managers, but i have none. No solution yet.

Nothing critical (for me), but hopefully these will get worked out soon.

UPDATE (2010/01/20) – All issues have been resolved!

http://agile2009.agilealliance.org/justificationtoolkit

Consider personalizing your program, and seeing how much value you can
receive for your time and money:

http://agile2009.agilealliance.org/personal_program

The program is also available online and in PDF format on:

http://agile2009.agilealliance.org/programOverview

We are almost out of Early Bird registrations, so register soon if you
want to snag one. Our 5-pack registration is the best deal. See
http://agileregistration.org for all the details.

Freshers’ Faire

We know that the crowd at Agile Conference can be intimidating, so don’t
miss the Ice Breaker on Monday. It will include a college-style
Freshers’ Faire where communities will be happy to introduce themselves
to you. The communities that will be represented include so far:
* Real Options
* CITCON
* Testing
* Leadership
* Agile Requirements
* Agile Coach and the Agile Coaches Gathering
* User Experience
* Telling Our Stories
* Agile Game designers/ enthousiasts
* Agile France
* PairWith.Us
* Kanban
* PMI
* Facilitation & Facilitation Patterns

Feel free to tell other communities about it and refer them to our blog
entry:

http://agile2009.wordpress.com/2009/07/16/freshers-faire-make-your-community-visible/

Programming with the Stars

One of the most fun events last year was Programming with the Stars, a
contest where you can pair with legendary programmers, and impress a
panel of ruthless judges. Programming with the Stars is coming back this
year, and you can apply too!

Check out an account from last year:

http://agile2009.wordpress.com/2009/07/19/programming-with-the-stars-coders-wanted/

Details on the contest there:

http://agile2009.agilealliance.org/programmingwiththestars

Personas

This year we are using “personas” as a quick way for attendees to tell
which sessions will be most relevant to their needs.

Personas are currently being described on the Conference blog. Watch for
them appear every few days!

Here is what we posted so far:

* http://agile2009.wordpress.com/2009/07/28/meet-billy-business-analyst/
* http://agile2009.wordpress.com/2009/07/25/meet-ellie-agile-explorer/
* http://agile2009.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/meet-rose-researcher/

* http://agile2009.wordpress.com/2009/07/21/meet-alex-architect/
* http://agile2009.wordpress.com/2009/07/15/meet-tara-tester/
* http://agile2009.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/meet-chandra-consultant/

*

http://agile2009.wordpress.com/2009/07/04/meet-padma-struggling-product-owner/

* http://agile2009.wordpress.com/2009/06/25/meet-rubin-reluctant-agilist/
* http://agile2009.wordpress.com/2009/06/18/meet-brooke-business-executive/

5-pack registration saves $400 per person!

Register now and get a $400 discount via a 5-pack registration.
Go to http://agile2009.agilealliance.org/ and choose “Register”.

A regular non-member single registration is a great deal at $1799, but
with a corporate group 5-pack, each person attends for only $1399 – a
savings of $400 each! It will work for you and your 4 friends too, no
need for you to be co-workers

There’s no better way to check out the benefits of Agile for your
company than to turn your thought leaders loose among hundreds of
expert-led sessions at Agile 2009. See you there!

Go get yours today.