Tumble dried BDD from Studio Pragmatists

On the 18th of May, 2010, the very new tumbler-glass project by Studio Pragmatists uploaded Tumbler 0.2.1 to Maven.  Having recently written about JBehave I found myself really liking the concept of behavior driven development.  So I decided to write a similar article about Tumbler. If you want the project code its available in my example project.

4 hour time box in 20 minutes!

Once again I decided to time box the work to 4 hours.  This time though the whole process only took about 20 minutes.  The product owner and testers produce a story file.  The Tumbler format allows for multiple stories each containing scenarios, so its possible to cover a complex set of requirements in one file.  This allows for flexibility when breaking down the work into tasks.  As per the usual behavior driven approach, a scenario contains the Given, When and Then sections which describe the behavior. Continue reading

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Bad or Good? Behavior Driven Development within Scrum.

I wanted to explore the possibility of using JBehave to formalise scrums definition of done. The idea being to encapsulate a definition of done as a JBehave scenario. So in true scrum style I decided to timebox 4 hours of work dedicated to JBehave.

From a scrum point of view BDD can be used to turn the definition of done into a test artifact. The team produces scenarios for each task. With JBehave a scenario file describes the required behavior and test steps it will need to pass to be considered done. I.e Given some prerequisites, perform some action and expect some results. See the JBehave project for more detail as this is only a simple example. Continue reading

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Influencing self organised teams

Fragile, Pink Rose, Beijing: Martin Harris

Pink Rose, Beijing: Martin Harris.

I have been reading chapter 12 of Succeeding with agile by Mike Cohn.  The chapter title is Leading a Self-Organising Team. I have been reading it in the following context:

Strive for technical excellence and Improving technical practices is not optional.

Why is it that improving technical excellence is sometimes neglected on a project?  Why do developers think its ok to check in classes with warnings, leave essential and easily written tests out or add to messy code.  You must of heard the phrase “nobody cares about a building with broken windows.”  One more broken window will not matter. The same applies to software. Often you will find developers harboring some kind of guilt for not fixing things.
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Estimates are not commitments!

Velocity, the new estimate

Cambodia, Phnom Penn, the water festival: Martin Harris

Probably one of the most common mistakes in Software Development is to allow Estimates to become Commitments.  I am sure you know the following scenario all too well.  The development team is called into a meeting room and asked the following question.  We (the management team) have had a look at the estimates, and your tasks on average are taking longer. The insinuation is that the development team is, stupid or perhaps lazy.  Worse still, an individual is called in because the stats show their work is “Behind Schedule” as judged by the estimates.  The problem is none of this though, the problem is believing that estimates are anything other than an educated guess.

Continue reading

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