As always - after the first day my head was just spinning. I was so tired that I slept before I hit the pillow. But today I’m feeling great again and am ready for another great day of learning.

Dan North on Embracing uncertainty

Dan North is one of my true heroes in our industry. I’ve learned a lot of the stuff that I’m excited about from stuff he written and spoke about. This is about embracing uncertainty - which seems to sit nice with the whole BDD - Deliberate Discovery body of knowledge. Here’s a few things I jotted down:

Patterns of effective delivery (behavior patterns that is)

How we turned the agile manifesto upside down nowadays

The half-time of requirements - how long time before half the requirements needs to be rewritten

“We would rather be wrong than be uncertain!”

Christianity (!) and how faith become religion. Or values becoming rules...

I was very fortunate to go to OreDev this year. It’s just a great show - I described it as a “free bar of knowledge alcohol for learn-o-holics”. I thought I’ll take a few moments just to jot down some highlights and stuff I picked up during my first day at OreDev 2011. This is mostly for me… but you can read it if you want.

Jon Skeet on Async in .NET 4.0

I was late to the conference and missed the keynote, that I learned was awesome, and also late to this talk. Jon Skeet on the asynchronous features of .NET 4.0. I picked up some stuff though - most noteable I’ll check out the EduAsync blog posts and code that shows of all interesting features.

Aslam Kahn on Functional programming

From this great session I picked up how Alsam had learned functional programming...

SpecFlow.Assist.Dynamic came about from my own need when I wrote something that used Simple.Data.

I saw the power and simplicity (duh!) in Simple.Data by using dynamics. And I started to thinking on how it could be used in SpecFlow to further simplify and shorten up the code in my steps.

This is the third and final post on SpecFlow.Assist.Dynamic. Again this is not the formal documentation. It can be found here. These are just my personal preferences and thoughts on how to use it. This time with Simple.Data. And it won’t be long.

SpecFlow and Simple.Data

First you should check out Darren Cauthons post on using SpecFlow and simple data together. It shows the great use of a lightweight, simple data access framework in SpecFlow.

As I said in my earlier post test data management is something...

This is the second post about <a href=”http://www.blogger.com/www.specflow.org”target=”_blank”>SpecFlow</a>.Assist.Dynamic – a little tool I wrote to help you write less code in your step definitions, and focus on the actual step instead of infrastructure. You can read the first post here – it explains little about what SpecFlow.Assist.Dynamic is.

In this post I’ll show you how some ways I use the dynamic features to and some tricks that you might not know about.

Again – this is not the documentation for SpecFlow.Assist.Dynamic – that can be found here.

Installation

With the power of NuGet it’s super-easy to install SpecFlow.Assist.Dynamic by simply go:

Install-Package SpecFlow.Assist.Dynamic 

(Sidenote: Ha! It’s good to try out your own stuff. Found a bug in the 0.2 version on NuGet. Fixed it with the 0.2.1 version )

That will also pull down the latest version...

NuGet package! I am so proud. Actually it’s just a small extension to SpecFlow and the excellent Assist helpers by Darren Cauthon.

But I learned quite a lot about dynamics in the process and I thought I write a post or two on SpecFlow.Assist.Dynamic; what it is, the problem it solves and how it’s made. Later post will be around how to use it and to put it together with Simple.Data to create a real sweet testing experience.

Let me say – before I start – that there is documentation for usage on the GitHub wiki. This is a blog posts on how I made SpecFlow.Assist.Dynamic – not the official documentation.

The problem

It’s not a very big problem I’ve solved – but I grew tired of writing small classes that just was...

Simple.Data–the testing story

I’ve fallen for Simple.Data big time. It’s so terse and concise that you almost lose the need for data access abstractions altogether. It’s just … there for you. Just see for yourself here. And when you have this power at your fingertips, it’s easy to forget the testing story. How should I use Simple.Data so that I can still write unit and acceptance tests with code using it?

In my unit tests, I do not want to call the database, of course, because that would slow my unit-level tests down. Also, if I do automated acceptance testing, I want to go end-to-end, testing the full stack of the application. But there the database access will slow me down, often in the form of a network hop as well.

Have no fear! Mr. Rendle has set us up with a couple of ways to...

The other day I got my hands on the Scrum Guide 2011. It’s a updated version of how Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland looks at Scrum, it’s practices and state today. It’s well worth a read – especially if you haven’t read up on Scrum in a while.

And let me here in the outset of this post also state that I have use Scrum a lot and it helped me and my teams a lot as well. I like Scrum to be short – but (had to be one right) I think that some situations doesn’t fit perfectly with Scrum.

After that short side note, let’s get back to the real thing. After I read the article I had an opportunity to sit down with Morgan Ahlström, a fellow lean / agile coach here at Avega Group. We started to discuss about the...

This is the third post in a short series on how Morgan and me went about to introduce Kanban and some Lean thinking to two support teams of the Avega Group office. You can read post 1 and post 2 before this to get the complete picture.

With this post I wanted to do some reflections on how the introduction of Kanban took hold for the teams and also what Morgan and me learned in the process. We are used to do this for IT-projects and teams working with system development or maintenance.

Reflection on the result for the teams

First week

The immediate and positive responses from the group was reactions like:

• “This is very clear and shows us what we are doing”
• “I can see dependencies between our tasks. And on the ones where we wait for...

This is really an age-old BDD question that pops up from time to time. Just now I got a question from an ex-colleague about it. A bit rephrased it something like this:

Should I test through the GUI all the way down to the database? How do you handle test-data in and test executing speed in those cases?

Many of us first got exposed to BDD tests through web applications and the way that we could test through the actual web page. We use tools like Watin, Selenium and other automation tools to accomplish that. We structure our automation code with page wrappers to get manageable automation code that can be re-used in our step definitions. For some BDD even implies automation (which is not at all the case).

On the “other” side we try to go through the whole stack and go through all the...

This is the second post in a small series on how we helped some parts of the Avega Group office to use Kanban to manage their workflow. In the first post we introduced the teams that we coached to a foundations for why you want to limit your work-in-process, what benefits that could give them and some key elements of Kanban and Lean. As a final exercise we helped them to create a simple Kanban board for each team. We stressed the fact that the boards not is complete (at any time!) but should change and this is just a suggestion. Together with the teams we created a simple board, containing the following columns and policies:

• Inbox – their to do list for a horizon that feel comfortable. We didn’t limit the number of items here, but suggested that they may think about that. Also we...