“If you quit today”–make someone happy

January 1, 2012

I have been working as a contractor for the better part of my career. Due to the nature of consultancy and the IT-business in general I’ve seen a lot of colleagues come and go. Brilliant people in many cases, people that you miss so bad when they have quit. So when the ubiquitous “Thank you for the time here”-mail comes I always try to write them a short sentence saying that I’ve really appreciated their company, competence and just being around them. And it hits me every time; why didn’t I say anything of this while we were colleagues? It’s so stupid. It’s so simple. And it takes about 5 minutes to write. I always find the time when they send the notice that they will quite.

So I will try this out – send people a “If you quit today … I would love to have said this first”-note...

What is Agile?

December 29, 2011

About a year ago, my project manager asked me to “just give a quick intro and overview; What is agile? 20 minutes or so…” At first, this didn’t seem too bad. But when I got home and started preparing, I realized how challenging it is to sum up agile!

For me, agile has become almost a lifestyle. Much of what I advocate or oppose relates to agile principles or practices. Now that agile is 10 years old, the buzzword has evolved, and almost anything good or innovative in software is branded with agile ™.

Is TDD agile? If you’re not doing TDD, are you not agile? Standups? Boards? The list goes on and on, and I couldn’t come up with a definitive answer. Either everything had to be included to be agile, or nothing was left.

Like the story of the old woman who collects wood:

She went...

Applying the Switch framework to broken builds

December 22, 2011

I’m rereading a great book – Switch by the Heath Brothers and it inspires me. The last time I read this book it inspired me to write a post and it’s happening again.

The book is about change, how to accomplish change and especially in situations where you are not in power or control. In short – how to talk to and influence others to understand the need for change and follow through on it.

One very smart thing is that you can download a cheat sheet that contains the ideas in a nutshell – the Switch Framework – for free. Of course it’s not much use if you haven’t read the book, so you better do that first. Could very well be the best book you read.

I thought I would apply the reasoning in the framework to a real life situation and...

Log4Net, RollingFile named by Date and the staticLogFileName setting

December 13, 2011

We have been chasing some strange logging bugs for a while in my current project. We are using log4net to do our logging and it works fine … until a couple of weeks ago. Some logging didn’t occur, in another case we didn’t get new files…

The fix is, very simple, but quite surprising and I thought I’ll share something on what we did to fix it.

We are using a RollingFileAppender and common strategy for how to handle the log files; we’re creating a new file for each new date. In order to achieve this we have set the following configuration:

 <appender name="RollingLogFileAppender" type="log4net.Appender.RollingFileAppender"> <file value="{a path here}" /> <appendToFile value="true" /> <rollingStyle value="Date" /> <datePattern value="yyyyMMdd" /> <layout...
      
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        Creating a Tools-Only NuGet Package

        
          December 11, 2011
        
      
      
        I have started to help out in a new OSS project. The last one was SpecFlow and now it’s Pickles. Pickles is a tool that takes .feature-files from SpecFlow or Cucumber and turns it into a nice living documentation. It’s a great addition to SpecFlow.
 Ok – one of the things I have been doing in the Pickles project is to create NuGet packages for the project different runners and especially lately the PowerShell runner. This will be the main way to interact with Pickles locally, which basically means that you’ll just write a command in the Package Manager Console to generate the documentation frictionless. Later you will probably run it as part of your NAnt or MsBuild build files.
 I learned a great deal about PowerShell and NuGet when I put that NuGet package together and since it was quite some time since I blogged...
      

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        What I learned from 'From User Stories to Acceptance Tests' with Gojko Adzic

        
          November 29, 2011
        
      
      
        I’ve just returned home from a course, marking my first training in over a year. It’s amazing how much you can learn in such a short time when the course and instructor are both excellent and you actively engage. This time, the course was led by Gojko Adzic, covering a subject I find both fascinating and valuable: Specification by Example.
 Though it’s impossible to capture all the insights from two days of learning, I want to highlight the key takeaways and main points that stood out for me. As someone well-versed in BDD and Specification by Example, my goal was to gain practical tips on managing the early stages of specification, focusing more on the practicalities than the theoretical aspects.
 Communicating with Examples
 We began with a simulation of a Black Jack game to explore the pitfalls of traditional testing approaches. Our group fell into common traps:...
      

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        BDD and technical scenarios

        
          November 23, 2011
        
      
      
        I got a question from Sham (Shamresh Khan) that I thought was interesting and also common. So I thought I post my answer here in the public and maybe we all can learn a bit.
 Sham’s question was something like this:
  …some of my scenarios/examples, may be very technical (i.e. checking some algorithm for example). If I write these tests under a user story (using the Gherkin syntax), a business analyst will be able to see them which may confuse them as they try to work out what scenarios exist under the user story or am I wrong here? Maybe all tests should be visible under a user story?
 
 TDD and BDD
 This is really one of the things we struggle with when coming from using TDD for a while and then starting doing BDD. In my opinion BDD is more than anything a communication tool that...
      

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        OreDev 2011 - day 3

        
          November 11, 2011
        
      
      
        Last day was great. I didn’t go to anything that was really bad and I had some real highlights with Dan North, Gojko Adzic and Mark Rendle on Zen standing out as the best.
 After a short and intense Lean Coffee I’m not sitting and waiting for the keynote with Jeff Atwood, who apparently just introduced himself and then went off the stage yesterday. Let’s see if he does the keynote himself today
 Jeff Atwood on StackOverflow
 Jeff did the talk himself (and talked fast, fast, fast!). He talked about how programmers need rules and likes to follow (or even create) rules. Take Facebook for example - who has a “list of their friends” at home. No-one! But a geek could understand social networks by creating rules around them. A list of friend for example.
 Huh - I didn’t know that Jeff Atwood did invent the gamification part of StackOverflow...
      

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        OreDev 2011 - day 2

        
          November 10, 2011
        
      
      
        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...
      

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        OreDev 2011 - day 1

        
          November  9, 2011
        
      
      
        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-holic”. 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 notable 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 Aslam had learned functional programming...
      

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