My weekend jog through the park was particularly interesting this week. Not just because of the light sprinkling of snow, bright sun and freezing temperatures. I had to watch my footing every time I heard myself interrupt Geoff or forget someone’s name. Yes, I was on my own. And no, nothing wrong with my head. (nothing serious, anyway). I was listening to the latest agile toolkit podcast where Bob Payne interviews Geoff and me.
In a previous post I was rather critical of Bob’s interviewing technique, and perhaps this is justified. He is a really genuinely friendly guy though, who is warm and enthusiastic towards people and that does make up for a lot. In the interview he did make some random joke about Thoughtworks that I still don’t get, but on the whole I think we got on ok.
In the first part of the interview we talk alot about how TextTest grew up in an environment of long running batch processes, and a bit about the crew planning system that Geoff wrote it to deal with. I hope listeners don’t decide this is boring and switch of at this point, because it does do more than just that. I talk a bit about what we did with TextTest on ‘Programming with the stars’ and then we discussed what else it is good for (legacy code, and even greenfield TDD development).
I did try to think through beforehand all the things I was going to say, but intevitably I left out a couple of important points. Neither of us mentioned that TextTest is written in python but can test any language (so long as it can produce plain text log output). I didn’t make it clear that I don’t work for Jeppesen, rather my new employer IBS JavaSolutions kindly paid my conference ticket. I said that ‘I’ got the highest marks in the stars competition instead of ‘we’ (forgive me Michael and Geoff! We did it together, I know)
Overall I think the podcast is worth listening to though. I hope it will encourage some people to try out texttest, and write automated tests for some code that they thought was untestable.
