At the latest AgileØresund meeting we had the usual mix of new and old people representing both devs/techleads and project managers. I (again) wanted to talk about team morale. Being a consultant I get to move between company cultures quite often, which allows me to more easily see and experience differences among them. Having worked for some of the larger traditional companies in Sweden, this is a most fascinating aspect. It is fun to reason about how the company culture has been devised and/or emerged, and what the logic behind it is - what must have been the benefits the leaders saw when promoting some values inside the organization? Morale in a team comes both from the context - from "upwards" if you like - and from within the team. A team needs a vision in order to believe in the work they do. If you do not think that the work you do will matter to anyone at all, then you are not likely to invest heavily in the work. From within the team, a breach of morale will spread: If someone looses faith in the project, that may spread and will at the least affect the others.

 

I think there is a junction where these things meet; how we express our faith and passion can become a heuristic that is then expected - a mindless rule that the team has to work overtime at some point, that the team has to do this and that. (Well, blindly following rules is almost never good, nothing new there.) This junction is basically where acting and appearances are more important than actual results. Acting and appearances are naturally very important, but are not directly related to the results.

 

Anyway, Chris mentioned this post from Kathy Sierra (I don't read her blog regularly anymore myself) that talks about the target of passion - company or work. I really see a connection to her post.

Roy blogs about testability in the language. I definitely think that the language could cater testability, much like it connects with other development needs. For example, in .NET there is the obsolete attribute which we may decorate a method with, which causes the compiler to issue a warning if someone compiles code that uses that method.

Likewise, I have for some time wondered if using an attribute indicating that a method is for testing purposes only would be useful. I think so.

Anyway, thanks for this Roy! It's amazing to see how quickly that debate springs up again! I am doing a workshop on testability and encapsulation and this is definitely inspiring, I almost thought that everyone had already gone past the encapsulation debate and that I wouldn't get anyone to discuss it with - but here is proof that it is not so again!

Hopefully we'll get even more perspectives.

There was a project called the Netron project a while  back, that offered a nice graphing library and several related libraries. I used to check the blog regularly, to see progress, and so on. I stopped for a year or more, but not so long ago, I ventured to do so again. I got really suprised, and went to do some checking. Check this adress, you may be surprised to:

 

http://netron.sourceforge.net/

 

Don't read on until you've checked it!

 

Checked it?

 

Were you surprised? I sure was. If you did not bother to check it, the sourceforge project page has been emptied of all contents (don't know if the source was ever hosted there though, here is someone saying that the CVS repos were removed, which would be very odd indeed). The project homepage link instantly redirects you to an ordering page for a graphing product "Go Diagram". Basically, an ordering page on sourceforge! Odd!

 

In summary, Netron was an open source project that did not use a well known license, but the license was a "use anyway you want" type of thing. It appears to be affiliated with this go diagram commercial venture, but there is no indication of how or why. I don't think there is anything wrong about that, per se. These things feel strange to me, though:

• The redirect from sourceforge to the order page.
• Not leaving a trace of the OS project - after you have accepted donations to the open source project. Check out the thankyou note to "Axel" at the end of this page.

It looks strange, and not pretty. If I had to call it by the looks of things, someone went commercial with the stuff and (perhaps even as insiduously as being part of some agreement?) removed all content they had control over, everywhere (sourceforge, codeproject articles, etc).

 

Other people have written about this, I wanted to note my own findings here. Do note this posting. There is a resurrection project for the source here, and much of the previously available documentation is hosted here. You can of course browse the archived versions of the homepage, archived codeproject article, and blog. It is strange, isn't it?

(Photo: Tony Richards, Herford)

ReSharper is the best refactoring tool for Visual Studio (it radically enhances the built in refactoring support of 2005) and it includes some killer features such as a very fast test runner (sorry Jamie, but on the other hand - you still need Testdriven to get at its wonderful reflector based debugging, among other killer features).

However, it does not natively support the awesome MbUnit test framework... until now - Albert Weinert has created a plugin that make the R# testrunner "mbunit aware"! This is great news. Check it out here. It is fresh and not complete but we really should cheer on herr Weinerts effort.

Meanwhile, Jetbrains have not been totally lazy ;) - if you have not upgraded to 2.5 I recommend it - the speed improvements are substantial to say the least. The difference compared to a vanilla 2005 install is not noticeable on my machine.

Oh, and if you haven't checked out mbunit, do so. They just got a new release off the compilers some weeks ago and it is looking better all the time.

In other blabla, just back from vacation and the mound of work is still just sitting there, I tried screaming at it but it just won't go away.

Christoffer announced our agile group meetings at the SNUG meeting yesterday. In case you missed the whole URL and ended up here, the link is:

http://mawi.org/agileoresund/

See you there!

Dev Days 2006, Stockholm in December

Microsoft is arranging a asp.net focused event, Dev Days 2006,  in Stockholm december 5th. I have agreed to talk about databinding in ASP.NET 2.0. Tobias Fjälling will be talking about AJAX. There is little info on the site, and no abstracts, but Johan Lindfors has put up the info on his blog, here, among other posts. Note that neither me, nor Tobias are cornerstone employees - despite what Johans post may indicate.

 

If you're doing ASP.NET development, come check it out - it's an inexpensive event, and there will be lots to choose from.

SPA 2007, Cambridge in March

The 2007 edition of the Software Practice Advancement conference is held in Cambridge. I will be giving a session in the form of a short workshop exploring testability, encapsulation and how they relate to each other. The idea is that the topic will serve as the starting point for a short collaborative exploration of these concepts, and we will all leave with a clearer understanding of them.

 

Check out the awesome programme here, and details of my session here. The conference is actually very inexpensive, and whereever you are in Europe, catching a flight to the UK is dirt cheap nowadays - so give it some consideration. The lineup includes names like Dave Thomas (of pragmatic programmers fame), Michael Feathers, Tony Hoare, Brian Marick (brilliant test specialist, known to go out of his way to give non-planning swedes rides to airports), Kevlin Henney, and a host of others.

Øredev 2006 is over, and it was pretty great - despite several last minute  (quite literally last day) cancellations from some high profile speakers. I talked to alot of people and many agree with me that the social atmosphere was very good. The panel on the last day rounded off the whole event nicely. In the picture you see Martin Fowler, Erik Doernenburg and James Coplien.

 

My presentation went pretty well, it seems alot of people enjoyed it. Here is the slidedeck for it.

 

I forgot a couple of things: First, I forgot to announce the next SNUG meeting, which is December 6th in Malmö - sorry chris. I also forgot to underline the steps after vou've got the code you're interested in under test. I managed to cover alot, but there are so many important ideas that I did not have time to cover.

 

The last thing I missed was the resources slide, you will find it in the download. I have also put out an older version of this talk in an older blog entry, look for it. As you probably noticed, the sessions where recorded, and I hear that there are plans to make them available to all attendees. Time will tell.