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 series detailing how we assisted some teams at the Avega Group office in implementing Kanban to manage their workflow. In the first post, we introduced the teams to the basics of Kanban and Lean, emphasizing the importance of limiting work-in-process and the benefits it could bring.

In this post, we’ll cover the initial implementation of Kanban boards for the teams and the early reactions to this new workflow system.

Setting Up the Kanban Boards

Together with the teams, we created simple Kanban boards tailored to their needs. We stressed that these boards were not final and should evolve over time. Here’s what we set up:

• Inbox – This column acts as the team’s to-do list for a comfortable horizon. We didn’t impose a limit on the number of items here but suggested they consider it. Items in this column...

I have recently returned from parental leave and got to experience office tempo first-hand. Was not prepared for that, but it also had me look around and I saw two teams at Avega Group that were under a lot of stress (they said) and seemed to handle a lot of tasks simultaneously.

Being dunked deeply in the Kanban-pool, it made the hair on my neck stand up and I shivered to my bones. WIP is bad you know…

Being an Avega Coach, I have some time to spend at the office, so I teamed up with Morgan, a fellow Lean/Agile coach here at Avega Group – and we decided to see if we could do anything about it.

In doing so, we had to sharpen our arguments and think a bit differently. They are not creating systems, you know. Both Morgan and I have experiences mostly...