Coding Is Like Cooking

I’m at Agile Testing Days this week, and yesterday I attended a tutorial with Lisa Crispin. I’ve never actually met her before, although I have read many of her articles, and the book she wrote together with Janet Gregory, “Agile Testing”. It’s an important book, covering in some detail the role of testers in agile teams, with lots of practical advice and anecdotes from real life.

So I was very interested to meet Lisa and hear what she had to say. She had lots of general advice and war stories about what kinds of tools are useful in an agile setting. From all the new insights and thoughts I gathered from the tutorial, there were two stories that I’d like to share with you here.

The Whole team decides
Lisa’s main message was that automated testing tool choice is a whole team decision, since everyone on an agile team will be affected. She told a story about when she joined a team of Java programmers and persuaded them to try Watir for web testing – a tool that lets you write tests in Ruby. Although the developers agreed to this and were initially keen to learn Ruby, it became clear after a while that they just weren’t comfortable with it, and Lisa found she just didn’t get the help she needed when extending and maintaining the tests. They switched to a tool where the tests were written in Java and things worked much better.

That depressed me a little, I have to say. I’d personally much rather be writing Ruby than Java! Someone else chipped in with another story though. On his team they were also developing a system in Java, with the difference that the developers were very keen to learn Groovy. They had started writing tests using it, and it was working very well. It made writing tests more fun, since they got to learn a language they were interested in. The test automation work was less effort than expected, since they felt much more productive in Groovy than Java. I guess the difference is that the developers were motivated to learn the new language because they had chosen it.

You can do ATDD with GUI testing tools
Lisa told an interesting story about GUI testing. She said she was working on some new features and realized that the only way to test them was was via a GUI testing tool. She was at first very skeptical that they would be able to do Acceptance Test Driven Development with a GUI tool – the GUI hadn’t been written yet, so how could they use this tool to write tests?

In the end she said it turned out really well. They worked from GUI mockups of the new features, and wrote tests with placeholders. When the test scripts needed to interact with GUI elements that didn’t exist yet, she just wrote them in terms of what she’d like there to be there, based on the mockups. When the programmers came to implement the GUI, they could fill in the placeholders and quickly get the new tests running.

This was encouraging since it’s basically the way you work with PyUseCase too. A criticism we get sometimes is that since PyUseCase is a capture-replay tool, you can’t use it to define the tests before the GUI exists – a problem if you’re trying to do Acceptance Test Driven Development. Our experience matches Lisa’s though – you can define the test in general terms, with placeholders, and parts that won’t execute at all at first. Some parts of the test of course can be recorded from the existing GUI. As the GUI is extended for the new feature, gradually you replace the placeholders with executable statements until the whole test passes.

And now for the rest of the conference…
Geoff is giving a talk this morning about PyUseCase and TextTest as part of the main Agile Testing Days conference. We’d really like to get some feedback from experienced testers. It’s a different approach to capture-replay that most people here, like Lisa, will not have seen before. There are lots of other interesting talks and things going on too, and I hope to find time to blog a little more about the conference later in the week.

Why are there so few women programmers? That’s a big question. How about a related one that’s slightly smaller: Why do so few women go to programmer conferences?

Nordic Ruby on Twitter
Nordic Ruby was clearly appreciated by many of its attendees. See tweets like this:

ronge: #nordicruby – best conference ever, looking forward meeting you all next year ! Lots of food for thoughts. Really sad it’s over.

skanev: #nordicruby was just awesome. Thank you guys

walming: Got so much inspiration. Big thanks @elabs for #nordicruby conference.

Very few Women
What I also noticed was, that of around 100 delegates, only 2 were women*.

I have to say, I go to a lot of conferences, which gives me plenty to compare it to. In addition to Nordic Ruby, in the past year I have been to: Scottish Ruby Conference, Scandinavian Developer Conference, JFokus, Smidig, Europython and XP2009. In general, I really enjoy conferences, and none of those I’ve mentioned had a huge proportion of females. Nordic Ruby was not exceptional in that respect. However, although I enjoyed Nordic Ruby, it does not feature in my all-time favourite list. I’ll come to why in a minute. A lot of things about the conference were very good, of course. Some of the talks were excellent, and the venues, food and parties were absolutely top knotch.

The format of of the conference was 30 minute talks (all on one track) interspersed with 30-120 minute breaks. The last session of each day was open and any attendee could give a short “lightning” talk, and many people did so. Every speaker, lightning or otherwise, had a large audience, since there was nothing else on the programme.

Hampton Catlin’s talk – the two kinds of Games
My favourite talk was one by Hampton Catlin, talking about how to make applications attractive to their users. He talked a bit about the different kinds of games that people prefer. Perhaps I can expand this idea to explain why I don’t rate Nordic Ruby as highly as some of the other attendees clearly did.

Hampton explained that computer games lie on a scale from Male-Oriented to Female-Oriented. They are called by those names because your physical gender is a good predictor of which sort you will prefer. (He stressed that you should keep in mind that people are complex, defy easy categorization, and a given individual could have preferences anywhere on the scale.)

The Male-Oriented game will let you score points and rank yourself against opponents. The Female-Oriented game will let you build supportive social networks with collaborators, and become admired by your peers. Hampton said that most computer games are Male-Oriented. He highlighted some exceptions, including Farmville, which is a popular game on Facebook. In fact, he said Facebook itself can be seen as a Female-Oriented game.

Programmer Conferences are like Games
This got me thinking about the Nordic Ruby conference. If Facebook can be seen as a game, can you see a conference that way too? Do attendees play for “score” and “rank”? Is the programmer’s conference game so Male-Oriented that most women just aren’t interested in playing?

The Conference as a Male-Oriented Game
If a programmer conference is a Male-Oriented Game, it will provide you with opportunities to improve your rank and score compared to other attendees. For example, giving a talk will let you show off the cool software project(s) you have created/contributed to. You can improve your rank by criticising other people’s code, and contrasting it with the beauty of your own. You can also score “geek points” by making gratuitous references to obscure programming languages, advanced mathematics and classic sci-fi films.

Your overall conference success is measured by how many people subsequently download your open source projects, and how many followers you gain on Twitter.

The Conference as a Female-Oriented Game
If a programmer conference is a Female-Oriented Game, it will provide you with opportunities to form supportive social networks and gain admiration. Lecture-style talks aren’t so good for that, so the conference will schedule sessions for attendees to have conversations with each other, and collaborate. The conference programme will raise discussion topics that interest attendees, and encourage idea sharing. There may be organized group sessions where you share programming-related problems, pool your ideas and collectively come up with strategies to move forwards. You will gain admiration by being insightful, charming and subtly drawing people’s attention to your open source projects, while also being admiring of others’ projects.

Your overall conference success is measured by how many people subsequently contribute to your open source projects, and how many friendly messages you get on Twitter.

Who Won Nordic Ruby?
Ok, I’m stretching the analogy rather, (!) but I’d say the Nordic Ruby conference game was a little too Male-Oriented for my liking. The focus of the programme was on lecture-style talks, and, put it this way, the speakers made way too many references to Star Wars! There were long breaks, which gave many opportunities for conversation, but there were no formal network-building activities. There was lots of time for chatting, but no mechanism to draw people together around, say, a discussion topic, or a collaborative coding exercise.

The conferences I have enjoyed most have involved relatively few lecture-style talks, and largely comprised of workshops, coding dojos, tutorials, conversation corners and open space discussions. Next week I’m going to XP2010 (which will be my seventh XP conference :-D), and it’s the first ever GothPyCon this Saturday. At both I am organizing coding dojo sessions – collaborative excercises in collective learning and mutual appreciation. Bring on the Female-Oriented conference games!

* There was also two other females there, but neither are programmers.

As I mentioned in my last post I chaired a fishbowl discussion at SDC2010 with title “Should a professional developer always use Test Driven Development?”. I was delighted that the invited panelists Michael Feathers, Geoff Bache and Andrew Dalke all turned up, along with a few dozen other conference participants. As I predicted, we had a lively and interesting debate.

Michael half-jokingly complained that Bob Martin goes around making these controvertial statements all the time, which Michael then gets to go around defending. Michael has a much more conciliatory attitude than Bob, and his take was that every truly professional developer must have at least given TDD a good try and learnt the technique, even if they then decide not to use it.

Geoff’s main point was that we need to widen the definition of TDD to include any process that involves checking in tests at the same time as the code, and not restrict it to just the classic Red-Green-Refactor style with tests in the same language as the code.

Michael was largely receptive to this view, or at least that the soundbite description of “never write any code until you have a failing test” probably was a bit too brief description to encompass the whole of TDD. He did argue though, that the classic TDD style leads to code with good design characteristics of high cohesion, loose coupling, small classes and methods etc, and that he had not found other design techniques which led to better code than TDD. He was not keen to move to a TDD approach without unit tests, and lose these benefits, even if they result in good tests.

Andrew argued that TDD is not sufficient by itself to produce a good suite of tests, and that there are other, better ways to produce these tests. Andrew pointed out that he had examined Fitnesse, a codebase that Bob Martin, (and some others), has created using TDD, and that he found several bugs, including security holes in it. Michael’s counterargument was that with TDD, you get as good tests as you are capable of – if you are not skilled/aware of security issues, then you won’t test for security holes, whatever process you use to create tests.

Another argument of Andrew’s was that he often likes to write tests that he expects to pass, to verify that his code works as expected, for example that he has implemented an algorithm correctly. In the narrow definition of TDD, you are only allowed to write tests you expect to fail. Michael’s take was that this was indeed a too narrow definition of TDD. He said that he frequently writes tests as a way of asking questions of his code, and this often leads to tests that pass straight away.

Some of the “audience” also stepped up to the microphones and joined in. Brian Marick pointed out that forcing yourself to write the test first was a very good way of ensuring you do actually write the test, instead of being lazy and just writing more code. The counter to that was along the lines of that there are other processes for arriving at a good test suite, which took different kinds of discipline. Andrew quoted the sqlite project, which boasts 100% branch coverage of their code by their test suite. Publishing your coverage figures and refusing to let them slip is a way of preventing developer laziness too.

Brian Marick wrote an article about coverage and tests over a decade ago, so he summarized it for us, which was interesting, but I think slightly beside the point. I think he was trying to argue that measuring coverage alone is not enough to guarantee you have a good test suite, but I don’t think that was what Andrew was trying to claim. Simply doing TDD is not a guarantee that you will end up with a good test suite either.

For me, the interesting outcome of the discussion was pointing out that the alternatives to TDD are not only “cowboy coding” or “test later, ie never”, or “bad tests”, but that there are other legitimate ways to come up with a good test suite, and professional developers may choose to use them instead of classic TDD. TDD is a discipline which all professional developers should perhaps have in their repertoire though. I think we agreed it is also a teaching aid for learning to write good tests.

Happily, we definitely all agree that creating a good automated test suite alongside code is important. The precise method a professional developer should always use to produce it was not agreed upon though.

A little while ago we had the first meeting of our new coding dojo here in Göteborg. We are focussing on learning Test Driven Development using Java and Eclipse. I was very encouraged that two of my colleagues, Fredrik and Martin, volunteered to help organize the group. There was actually quite a lot of interest generally, and we filled all 12 places and even have a (small) waiting list. I didn’t want the group to grow too big, since the dojo style of learning should be quite participatory, and the time slot is only 2 hours. Everyone should get a chance to be heard, and to take the keyboard.

At the meeting I introduced the dojo concept with a set of slides I have used before. At dojo meetings our focus should be on deliberate practice, aquiring good coding habits, mutual encouragement and feedback.

We then took on KataFizzBuzz which went very smoothly. I started by introducing the Kata, using a picture of the “teacher” pointing at you, asking you to say the next number in the FizzBuzz sequence. She is sufficiently scary looking that you definitely need to write a program to print a FizzBuzz cheat sheet before the next lesson!
I also introduced something I havn’t done before at a dojo meeting – starting with some code rather than a blank editor. I had the acceptance test for the Kata already coded up and failing. When I practiced this Kata I realized the hardest part was writing the acceptance test, which captures the sequence that is written to System.out. I could have begun the meeting by written it in front of the audience, but I really wanted to get them coding, not just watching me.

Martin wrote the first unit test, fizzbuzz(1) -> [1] and I noticed that his style is slightly different from mine. He fixed all the compiler errors as he went along, whereas I would tend to leave them all until I finish the test, or at least until I want to run it. Maybe that is because he has worked in Java/Eclipse longer than me, and that is the way Eclipse likes you to work. Anyway, I then implemented the code to make the test pass (fake it!) and wrote the next test fizzbuzz(2) -> [1,2]. So then he had to write just enough code to make it pass (a simple loop).

Then we handed the keyboard to two members of the audience, and Martin and I sat down in their chairs, and the Randori was really underway. We continued with this pair and two others using this ping-pong style until after about an hour we had completed the first part of the Kata – printing out the basic fizzbuzz sequence up to 100.

I suggested that the pair at the front try to run the acceptance test, which they did, and it failed. The reason was that the unit tests had been testing an internal method fizzbuzz() and the acceptance test checked that when you call main() you get the right sequence written to System.out. It was at this point I wondered if I had made the right decision when I wrote the acceptance test in advance, since that meant the guy at the keyboard clearly didn’t really understand what it was for. His first thought of how to make it pass was to change it to call fizzbuzz() instead of main(), until I stopped him – “No! don’t change the test! Fix the code!”. I felt like I was rapping him over the knuckles with a ruler (something I am thankful my Maths teacher never did).

Towards the end of the meeting so we held a 10 minute retrospective. People seemed cautiously positive towards TDD and the dojo in general, but I think they maybe still getting used to the format and working out whether it is “ok” to be openly critical. I hope for more dissent, discussion and group learning next time.

I’m planning to start a new dojo this autumn, called JDojo@Gbg. I was inspired by the guys at Responsive in Linköping, who I met at XP2009. They have been running a dojo for some time now, and find it is an excellent way to introduce programmers from their clients to the ideas of Test Driven Development. I think we could do with more test infected programmers about the place in Göteborg, too.

I already run a dojo as part of GothPy, and Got.rb also runs regular Kata/dojo evenings, but because those programming languages are not mainstream, many developers wouldn’t consider coming along. That is why the new dojo is explicitly going to use Java, or at least, the JVM platform.

I’m thinking about what Katas we are going to tackle at the new dojo, and last night I had a go at KataFizzBuzz in Java. It is an extremely simple problem to solve, and initially I thought it was too easy to be a Kata actually. Then at agile2008 I was looking around for a Kata that Michael Feathers and I could perform in 4 minutes for the “Programming with the Stars” competition, and it seemed to fit the bill. I was quite pleased we got done in that short amount of time (in python of course 🙂

A couple of people have commented that this Kata is actually quite good for teaching TDD, just because it is so simple to solve. People are forced to think about TDD instead of the problem. It can easily be made more interesting by adding new requirements too. So I think I might try it out at JDojo@Gbg.