Last night’s Elevate event was another impressive showcase of the diverse knowledge within Avega. The focus was on Agile Testing, a topic that has often confused and frustrated me. I’ve struggled to implement effective agile testing practices in the teams I’ve led. Here are some of the challenges I’ve faced:

• No Testers and No Testing in the Team: This approach led to a traditional waterfall-like process with a separate testing phase after development. We missed out on the benefits of agile methodologies.
• Testers in the Team, But Not Doing Agile Testing: When testers were included, they still followed company policies, which meant extensive documentation and test planning for each minor change. This approach proved inefficient.
• Testers Testing Only Sprint Work: In this setup, testers only tested the features developed during the sprint, with an acceptance test phase every 4-5 sprints. While this was better, it still led...

Over the past month, I’ve been involved in numerous meeting scheduling activities. The process always seems to involve a lot of back-and-forth with dates before finally settling on one.

If you’ve read Lean Software Development by the Poppendiecks, you’re familiar with the concept of Set-based Problem Solving.

The website WhenIsGood utilizes this approach to simplify the process of finding a mutually convenient meeting time. It’s a straightforward, low-impact tool that can help streamline scheduling. You can check out their introduction video to see how it works.

This tool is a practical example of applying set-based problem-solving to everyday tasks, making the scheduling process more efficient and less frustrating.

I’m still amazed at how JavaScript has evolved. A language that many of us once dismissed has become a critical part of modern web development. Fortunately, the emergence of various JavaScript libraries means we don’t have to write everything from scratch.

One of the most talked-about libraries these days is jQuery. Initially, I thought it was just another LINQ dialect, but I quickly realized it’s far more than that. While it spares me from having to hack everything myself, I still need to get up to speed with it—and with CSS, since jQuery heavily interacts with CSS classes and other elements.

Here are some resources that have helped me get started with jQuery:

• Introduction to jQuery: A great screencast for designers. It might have some jargon and a bit of flair from the presenter.
• The second part of the screencast: Continues from the first part.
• Read More

Cucumber

This session was quite interesting, especially given my enthusiasm for Cucumber. The presenter, Aslak Hellesøy, had an unusual prop—a blender on his desk—which added a quirky touch to the talk.

Aslak began with an introduction to Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) and Test-Driven Development (TDD). He emphasized Dan North’s ideas on BDD, highlighting its outside-in approach, which focuses on business value.

Aslak, the creator of Cucumber, showcased its basics. Although he didn’t delve into .NET or C#, there is support for these technologies, and hopefully, it integrates well with Visual Studio. Despite the blender’s lack of success, the presentation was engaging, and I plan to explore Cucumber further.

ASP.NET MVC Advanced Ninja

The next session, titled “ASP.NET MVC Advanced Ninja,” covered new features in Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET MVC 2.0. Here are some highlights:

• ASP.NET 4 introduces a shorthand for HTML encoding output with...

Information Overload and Managing Flow

The final day of ÖreDev started with a keynote by Scott Hanselman, one of my “heroes.” His talks are always insightful and humorous. Here are some key takeaways from his session:

• Effectiveness: Doing the right things.
• Efficiency: Doing things right (like jumping off a cliff efficiently!).
• Triage: Sort information and avoid leaving things in your inbox. Use the “Do it – Drop it – Delegate it – Defer it” approach to manage tasks.
• Signals vs. Noise: Sort your data streams (Twitter, email, colleagues) into these categories.
• Email Management: Emails where you’re CC’d are less important. Avoid checking emails first thing in the morning to prevent becoming the fastest responder to all problems. Instead, check emails three times a day for 20 minutes each.
• Work Hours: Don’t try to outwork the system by putting in more hours. Instead, use techniques like the Read More

I’m still feeling a bit exhausted from Dan North’s previous talk, but now it’s time for some more down-to-earth coding topics.

Putting the M of ASP.NET MVC with Scott Allen

Scott Allen started by discussing the role of the model in ASP.NET MVC and its intended audience:

• Business objects can be useful, especially when building wrappers around SQL Management Studio, but they may not always serve the best purpose in MVC applications.
• The model often has to cater to both the view and the business logic. To address this, Scott recommends creating a view model. While this may lead to many classes, it ensures that each class has a well-defined responsibility.
• You can define an interface to specify which properties should be bound when using TryUpdateModel<T>.
• Instead of using IModelBinder for model binding, which can be cumbersome, override OnModelUpdated on the default model binder...

Today’s session with Dan North was a standout. Following a somewhat disappointing morning, Dan’s talk was exactly what I needed to rejuvenate my enthusiasm.

Dan had promised a critical look at Scrum, and he delivered. Here are some key takeaways from his session:

• “A manager in a crappy system with a certificate is still a manager in a crappy system.”
• “Certified$crumMa$ter :)”
• Refer to the Satir Change Model to understand people’s resistance to change.
• Consider the Dreyfus Model for skill acquisition stages.
• Ken Schweiber’s assertion: “75% of uncoached Scrum projects will fail.”
• Implement continuous integration and automated tests to reveal and address underlying issues.
• Use assumption tests to document assumptions on legacy code.
• Embrace Deliberate Discovery in domain understanding, architecture, and team dynamics.
• Practice Rolling Wave Planning to detail only imminent stories.
• Write concise stories and break features into manageable pieces.
• Beware of “WaterScrum,”...

Keynote: What Drives Design?

We kicked off the day with an intriguing keynote on the driving forces behind design, focusing particularly on the latter two “D”s in various xDD methodologies (such as TDD, BDD, etc.). The talk started with a fascinating historical overview, showcasing how our industry is still relatively young, with many pioneers still active.

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock discussed Responsibility-Driven Design (RDD) and compared it with other development techniques like TDD, BDD, FDD, and DDD. Her insights into these patterns and their evolution were thought-provoking.

Making the Sausage

The session with Dan North, Neal Ford, Stuart Halloway, and Tyler Jennings explored BDD within the context of Clojure. Although it was an engaging discussion, I found it challenging to keep up with their fast-paced ideas. Functional programming can be complex, and with four functional experts presenting late-night code, it...

The Fallacy of Efficiency

Dan North delivered an insightful talk on not blindly pursuing efficiency, emphasizing the difference between efficiency (effort expended) and effectiveness (outcomes achieved). His presentation was full of valuable insights and thought-provoking ideas. I hope to share the slides here soon, as it’s challenging to summarize his points adequately. Dan North is definitely worth checking out—he’s both brilliant and entertaining.

Explorations of NHibernate

Stephen Bohlen, known for his rapid presentation style, discussed various add-ons for NHibernate. Here are some highlights:

• Rhino Tools
• uNhAddins
• NHibernate Validator, including a fluent interface
• NHLambdaExtensions
• NHibernate Burrow for business transactions without hitting the database
• Fluent NHibernate, which I have previously praised
• NHProfiler
• HornGet.NET

The session was packed with information, making it hard to keep up, but it was immensely valuable.

Productive WCF

As the day progressed, Juval...

Accomplishing More by Doing Less

The day began with a keynote by Marc Lesser on “Accomplishing More by Doing Less.” This session revisited some concepts from Monday’s talk, offering a clearer and more concise understanding. It was a valuable refresher.

A standout quote was: “Find the One who is not busy”—whether that’s in yourself, a higher power, or something else that resonates with you.

Scrum – Why It’s So Hard to Implement

Jens Ödegaard’s talk addressed the challenges of implementing Scrum. It was reassuring to see that my struggles were not unique. Key takeaways included:

• Organizations must be willing to abandon traditional management styles.
• Teams should support each other—if you can’t directly help, at least show solidarity (even if it means bringing coffee).
• Problems in Scrum often existed before but were unnoticed.
• A ScrumMaster should educate the organization about Scrum and remove impediments to help the team...