Coding Is Like Cooking

Geoff has been working really hard for the past few months, writing pyUseCase 3.0. It has some very substantial improvements over previous versions, and I am very excited about it. He’s written about how it works here.

It’s a tool for testing GUIs with a record-replay paradigm, that actually works. Seriously, you can do agile development with these tests, they don’t break the minute you change your GUI. The reason for this is that the tests are written in a high level domain language, decoupled from the actual current layout of your GUI. The tool lets you create and maintain a mapping file from the current widgets to the domain language, and helps you to keep it up to date.

In a way it’s a bit like Robot, or Twist, or Cucumber, that your tests end up being very human readable. The main difference is the record-replay capability. Anyone who can use the application GUI can create a test, which they can run straight away. With these other tools, a programmer typically has to go away and map the user domain language of the test into something that actually executes.

The other main way in which pyUseCase is different from other tools, is the way it checks your application did the right thing. Instead of the test writer having to choose some aspects of the GUI and make assertions about what they should look like, pyUseCase just records what the whole GUI looks like, in a plain text log. Then you can use TextTest to compare the log you get today with the one you originally recorded when you created the test. The test writer can concentrate on just normal interaction with the GUI, and still have very comprehensive assertions built into the tests they create.

pyUseCase, together with TextTest, makes it really easy to create automated tests, without writing code, that are straightforward to maintain, and readable by application users. Geoff has been developing his approach to testing for nearly a decade, and I think it is mature enough now, and sufficiently far ahead of the competition, that it is going to transform the way we do agile testing.

😀

Today I listened to a presentation about “Scrum for Managers” from Jens Östergaard. He’s a big, friendly Dane who grew up in Sweden, and now lives in the UK. I first met Jens at XP2003 in Genoa, when he had just run his first successful Scrum project. These days he spends his time flying around the world, teaching Scrum courses and coaching Scrum Masters. (He’ll be doing 2 more CSM courses in Göteborg in the next 6 months, and speaking at Scandinavian Developer Conference).

One thing I noticed about his talk was that most things about Scrum hardly seem to have changed at all. Jens was largely using the same language and examples that are in the original books. The other thing that struck me was that Jens said nothing about the technical practices that are needed to make agile development work. In my world, you can’t possibly hope to reliably deliver working software every sprint/iteration if you havn’t got basic practices like continuous integration and automated testing in place. I asked Jens about this afterwards, and he said it was deliberate. Scrum is a project management framework that can be applied to virtually any field, not just software development. Therefore he didn’t want to talk about software specific practices.

When I first heard Ken Schwaber talk about Scrum (keynote at XP2002) I’m farily sure he included the XP developer practices. I can’t find my notes from that speech, but I remember him being very firey and enthusiastic and encouraging us to go out and convert the world to Scrum and XP (the word agile wasn’t invented then).

Scrum has been hugely successful since then. Today we had a room full of project managers and line managers who all knew something about Scrum, many of whom are using it daily in their organizations. Scrum is relatively easy to understand and get going with at the project level, and has this CSM training course that thousands of people have been on. These are not bad things.

I do think that dropping the XP development practices entirely from the description of Scrum is unhelpful. I chatted with several people who are having difficulty getting Scrum to work in their organizations, and I think lack of developer practices, particularly automated testing, is compounding their problems. I think a talk given to software managers needs to say something about how developers might need coaching and training in new practices if they are going to succeed with Scrum.

The programme for Scandinavian Developer Conference has just been published. I think we have a fantastic line up of speakers this year. I am particularly pleased Michael Feathers, Brian Marick and Diana Larsen have agreed to join us, and that this year my husband Geoff is also a speaker.

I have met Michael and Diana at many XP conferences over the years, but I missed Brian Marick the one time I was at the agile conference in North America, so I’m particularly interested to hear what he has to say. He has been very influential in the testing community, and invented the idea of testing quadrants, which I think is a very helpful way of thinking about testing.

Michael Feathers is known for his book “Working Effectively with Legacy Code”, which I reviewed early drafts of back in like 2004. He and I also competed together in “Programming with the Stars” at agile2008. Michael works for Object Mentor, coaching teams in all things agile.

Diana Larsen is chairman of the agile alliance, and has written a book about retrospectives together with Esther Derby. I think I first met her at XP2005, when I attended her tutorial, which I remember as outstanding. It was very interactive and all about communication skills and teambuilding. Her job seems to be all about teaching the people skills needed for agile to work.

Geoff is going to be talking about texttest, which goes from strength to strength, and productive GUI testing with pyUseCase. Geoff has been doing an awful lot of work on this tool lately, and I am really excited about the possibilities it opens up for agile testing. I will have to write a separate post on that though, so watch this space 🙂

Many of the other speakers are familiar faces who I look forward to meeting up with again – Bill Wake, (books about refactoring, XP and Ruby), Erik Lundh, (the earliest Swedish XP coach), Niclas Nilsson (ruby, programming guru), Jimmy Nilsson (Domain Driven Design book), Neal Ford (Thoughtworks, productive programmer book), Thomas Nilsson, (CTO, Responsive, linköping), Ola Ellnestam (CEO, Agical, stockholm), Marcus Ahnve (programming guru), Chris Hedgate (programming guru)…

I’m also very pleased that I’m going to be speaking again this year, after the success of my previous presentation on “clean code“. This year I hope to talk about agile testing and how best to approach it.

One of the reasons I keep going back to the XP conference is the amount of interaction and discussion generated by the many workshops and open space sessions. There are very few straight talks, and all are either presentations of academic papers, or keynotes. When I saw the proposed programme for SDC a couple of weeks ago, I felt it was lacking something. Eight parallel tracks of presentations is all very well, but where is the interaction, the whole reason to go to a conference and not just watch presentations on infoq? So I proposed a ninth “track”, devoted to discussion, called “conversation corner“. Luckily my colleagues at iptor, who are organizing the conference, liked my idea.

To get the conversations going, I am organizing four “fishbowl” style discussions, seeded by conference speakers. I’ve picked topics that interest me, and invited other conference speakers, who I think are also interested in these topics, to join me.

I am hoping that after participating in one or two of my fishbowls, some conference attendees might feel comfortable proposing discussions of their own. To that end there will be a board with timeslots and index cards, so people can write up their topic, assign it to an empty timeslot, and hence invite more people to join them.

It won’t be full blown open space, there will be no opening meeting with everyone, or two minute pitches proposing sessions. I won’t be explaining the law of two feet or the open space rules. But it is a step in that direction, and I hope a complement to the organized speeches going on in the rest of the conference.

Perhaps you’d like to join us at the conference? Register here.

It occurred to me that I should mention that I now work for Iptor Konsult AB rather than IBS JavaSolutions. This is not due to my changing jobs, rather that IBS decided that since we don’t do the same things as the rest of the company, we should have a separate name and image. We are even going to be a separate legal entity, although still wholly owned by IBS.

I think it’s a very positive development for both parties, and I personally am much more comfortable standing up and presenting myself as from Iptor than I ever was when it was IBS JavaSolutions. For a start it’s not also the name of a rather unpleasant illness, and secondly it means I can avoid mentioning Java. A language I now work with daily, but don’t enjoy nearly so much as python.

In practice though, the name change probably won’t make that much difference in my daily life.

When I wrote this post about the public Texttest nightjob statistics, I thought they were a bit confusing and hard to understand. Geoff has now rewritten the page to contain fewer numbers, and just report the passed and failed tests from the previous night. I think it’s a bit easier to read now. He has also ditched about 500 tests that were running on Solaris, since that platform is not used often, and these tests never found bugs that weren’t also found on Linux.

The statistics are still pretty impressive though, don’t you think?