Coding Is Like Cooking

I forget exactly when, but I think it was 2008 or 2009. Anyway, I was at a software conference, and I was chatting with a developer after one of the sessions about cool new technologies and stuff. I don’t remember what hot new thing it was we talked about, all I remember, is the shoes he was wearing!

credit: flickr, Steve Hodgson

This is rather an unusual style of running shoe. At the time, I’d never seen any like this before, and I was intrigued. It turns out that this developer I was talking to was, like me, also something of a serial early adopter, it’s just that he not only picked up shiny new programming tools and technologies.

At the time, I was running in a pair of shoes with thick heel padding the shop assistant had assured me would correct my bad posture and foot “pronation”. This guy’s “five finger” shoes had none of that, in fact quite the opposite. I was looking at disruptive running technology.

The conversation quickly switched from the latest programming tools and frameworks, as this guy explained the essential benefits of his shoes:

• Lightweight
• Your toes can spread out, giving better push-off from the ground
• Thin sole – you adapt your stride to the surface because you can feel it
• No heel padding, means you strike the ground with the whole foot simultaneously.

And of course, most importantly for a technology enthusiast:

• People stare at you feet!

Following this conversation, a little googling about and watching the odd video by a “running style expert”, I became convinced. To be honest, it wasn’t much contest – shiny new technology, being in with the cool kids – I bought some new shoes, with toes and everything!

It took me several weeks to get used to them. You have to start with short distances, build up some new muscles in your foot, and learn to strike the ground with the whole foot at once. In my old shoes, I had a tendency to strike heel-first, because of the huge wad of padding on the sole, but in these minimal shoes, that just hurt. It was useful feedback, the whole-foot-at-once gait is supposed to be better for your knees.

After a few weeks of running shorter distances, slower than before, I gradually found my stride, and really started to enjoy running my usual 7km circuit of the local forest, in my eye-catching five-fingered shoes.
Unfortunately it didn’t last. Maybe two or three months later something happened. I think the technical term for it is Swedish Autumn. It turns out that forest tracks gain a surprising number of cold, muddy puddles at that time of year! Shoes with a very thin sole that isolate and surround each individual toe in waterlogged fabric, mean absolutely freezing feet 🙁

So I’m back on the internet, looking for new, shiny technology to fix this problem, and of course, I buy some new shoes. This time I got a pair of minimalist shoes in waterproof goretex, with basically all the features of my old shoes, minus the individual toes.

I was back out on the forest track, faster than ever, with dry, comfortable feet – win! The only problem was, people were no longer staring at my eye-catching toes. So you can’t have it all!

So this is normally a blog about programming. What’s going on?

Test Driven Development as a Disruptive Technology

I’ve been thinking about this, and it seems to me that as with running shoes that have toes, TDD is something of a disruptive technology. Just as I haven’t seen the majority of runners switch to shoes with toes, I also havn’t seen the majority of developers using TDD yet. Neither seem to have crossed Geoffrey Moore’s “chasm”.

Lots of developers write unit tests, but I think that’s slightly different. I’m talking about a TDD where developers primarily use tests to inform and direct design decisions, and rely on them for minute-by-minute feedback as they work. In 2009, Kent Beck made an observation in his blog that “the data suggests that there are at most a few thousand Java programmers actively practicing TDD”. I don’t think the situation is radically different today.

So can we learn anything about TDD from the story about running shoes? A couple of points I find relevant:

• Early adopters will try a new technology based on really very flimsy evidence, and will persevere with it, even if it slows them down in the short term.
• Early adopters like to look cool and stick out.

You may think that last point is just vanity, but actually, being a talking point helps drive adoption, but primarily amongst other, similarly minded technology geeks.

I remember a while back I was at work, writing some code, when a guy from another team came over to ask me something. He was about to leave, when he did a double-take and stared at my screen for a moment. “Are you doing TDD? I’ve never seen anyone actually do that in production code. Do you mind if I watch?”. So, you see, eye-catching shiny new technology, and I’m one of the cool kids, about to be emulated by the guy in the next team. 🙂

The other part of this story, is of course the compromise I made when the cool technology met the reality of a muddy Swedish forest track. The toes went, but the shoe I ended up with is still radically different from the one I had before. I think that for TDD to reach the mainstream, it may need to become a little less extreme, a little more practical – but without losing the essential benefits.

What are the essential benefits of TDD? Well, I would say something like this:

• Design: useful feedback, pushing you away from long methods and tightly-coupled classes, because they’re hard to test.
• Refactoring: quickly detecting regression when you make a mistake
• Productivity: helping you to manage complexity and work incrementally

So is it possible to get these things in another way? Without driving development minute-by-minute with tests? Well, that’s probably the subject of another blog post…

You might be interested to watch a video of my recent keynote speech at Europython, where I told this story.

I was recently at the Software Craftsmanship Conference at Bletchley Park in the UK. This is a one-day conference for software developers, attended by around 150 programmers. All proceeds from the event go to support Bletchley Park, which is of historical interest to programmers in particular – the site where Alan Turing and others cracked the enigma code in the 2nd world war. It was the fifth time this conference has been run, and the first time I attended. This is a short experience report.

In the morning I ran a workshop titled “Outside-In, with or without Mocks?“. We were about 50 people in the Ballroom in the Mansion, a very grand room, and it was really great to see so many people working in pairs at laptops, puzzling over some code and tests and how to do Test Driven Development. We were looking at a code kata I’ve designed called “Train Reservation“. It’s in no way a beginner exercise, and the crowd at Bletchley seemed to get on with it rather well on the whole. I’m just sorry I didn’t get round to talk to each pair very often, with 24 pairs I only had a couple of conversations with each during the 2 hour session!

I set up the exercise more or less to force people to use some kind of mock, fake or stub to replace the Booking Reference Service and the Train Data Service, because I am interested in how different people use these. I’ve observed that some programmers avoid using test doubles whenever possible, while others use them frequently. I’ve also observed that some people prefer to work outside-in, starting with a guiding test, while others prefer to start with the business rules at the heart of the problem and work outwards from there. At this particular workshop, there were all sorts of approaches being used. Some started with the guiding test and stubbed the services. Others started with the business logic around the seat selection rules. Different approaches, as I had hoped! Overall I feel encouraged that this exercise is a useful one, and people seemed to get on better with it than the last time I ran it, at XP2013. It’s till rather too big of a problem to tackle in a half day workshop though. I’ll be updating it some more before I run it again, although I don’t have any fixed plans for when that will be yet.

In the afternoon, I went to a session by Ivan Moore and Mike Hill, “Inheritance to Composition“. They gave us a demo of this particular refactoring using a very simple codebase, before launching us into a much more complex one – Fitnesse (starting from the branch “revised-ResponderFactory”). The idea was to take some classes that were using Inheritance – specifically the Template Method pattern – and convert them to instead use Composition – specifically the Strategy pattern. They also helpfully provided us with a sheet of instructions – 6 steps to complete the refactoring with minimal risk and code breakage.

My pair and I got on fairly well with the refactoring, and by the end of the session we were on step 5 with the goal in sight. The experience was of using Eclipse’s refactoring tools extensively, and relying a great deal on the compiler. The tests we had to lean on took a minute and a half to run, and actually, the tests for the classes we were working on were more mini-integration tests than unit tests as such. It meant there were relatively few updates to the tests as we did the refactoring, but the feedback loop was slow. I thought that was really interesting, and was wondering how the experience of the refactoring would change in a language like Python. There you don’t have a compiler, or very much help from refactoring tools.

So after the workshop, I set about trying to construct a similar problem in Python. Perhaps understandably, I didn’t want to translate the whole of Fitnesse to Python, (!), so I tried to re-write only the elements of it essential to this exercise. You can have a look at what I’ve come up with in my new repo “WikiSearchKata“. I’m still working on preparing this properly as an exercise, (the instructions are still rather thin), but I plan to try it out at a GothPy meeting sometime soon.

After the conference sessions had ended, we were treated to a guided tour of the National Museum of Computing which was for me, the highlight of the day! Our enthusiastic guide showed us all sorts of ancient computers and storage devices and punch cards… a few I recognized from my childhood. My dad used to bring home old punch cards and my mum used to write her shopping lists on them when she went to the supermarket. They had a 48K ZX spectrum with rubber keys – just the same as the one I wrote my first program on! They had a CRAY supercomputer similar to the one I remember seeing once when I visited my dad’s work as a child. It’s a similar size to (the outside view of) a Tardis, with a big red button on the front. I don’t think we found out what the red button does, but the guide did say we probably have more computing power in the smartphone in our pocket! I found the changes in storage capacity actually even more impressive. They had these washing-machine sized boxes and dinner-plate sized metal disks that together made a hard drive. I think it held something like 4K.

The highlight of the tour was the WITCH computer – the oldest working computer in the world. It was brilliant! You could actually see what it was doing while it read in a paper tape punched with holes – the program – and loaded values into registries and did calculations. It made this fantastic whirring noise as it ran, and has all these little whizzy flashing lights. It works in decimal rather than binary, so each number is represented by a little “dekatron” – a glass tube with a red light inside, that moves between positions 0-9 in a circle. So you can read which number is in the registry by looking at the position of each light in the array. They also had this little button you could press to make it step through the program one instruction at a time. I got to press it, and single-step a computer from 1951!

Compared with other conferences I’ve been too, this one was rather short, just one day, and with rather long sessions – half or whole day. It was hard work coding and facilitating all day, but in general very interesting people and coding exercises. A second day would have made it more worthwhile my making the trip. In any case, my thanks to Jon Dickinson for organizing it.

Last week I created a little quiz  and put a link to it on Twitter. I was interested to see whether the terminology around Test Doubles has standardized on Gerard Meszaro’s definitions, from his book “xUnit Test Patterns“, and I thought my twitter followers (I have over 1000 now!) might be able to tell me.

The quiz was taken by nearly 150 people, and overall, my conclusion is that Meszaro’s definitions are in general use today, (at least amongst people who follow me on Twitter). You can see a summary of the responses here. (I’ve closed the survey now, btw).

The first question was “Which of these is not a kind of Test Double”, and anyone who thought a “Suite” was a kind of test double clearly hasn’t got a clue, so I excluded their answers from my analysis. That was only a handful of responses though.

Looking at the remaining answers, between 70 – 85% share my understanding of what each kind of test double is. The scores are noticably a little lower for ‘Spy’, and actually I think my question on Spies was not very good. Jason Gorman kindly sent me a few tweets pointing out what he thought was unclear about it. The answer I was looking for to distinguish a Spy was “A Spy may raise an exception in the ‘Assert’ part of the test.”.  I was trying to articulate the difference between a “Spy” and a “Mock”, but I’ve personally only used Test Spy frameworks like Mockito and unittest.mock. Clearly I have more to learn.

I got the Mock question right, “A mock will fail the test if its methods are not called as expected”, but I thought a Spy was basically the same, except it fails the test in the “Assert” part instead of the “Act” part. Jason kindly pointed out that a Spy could be a Stub, a Fake, or even a decorated ‘real’ object. You don’t necessarily need to use a framework. The distinguishing feature of a Spy is that it records information about interactions, that your test can query later. So that was a good result from my quiz – I learnt something about Spies!

I also asked whether people had read Gerard Meszaro’s book, or my work-in-progress book, because I was interested to see if people would give better answers in this case. When I excluded all the people who said they hadn’t read either book, (about a third of responses), the scores improved significantly – over 80% agreed with me about the definitions of Mock, Stub and Fake. For Spies, on the other hand, the score was lower than for the group as a whole! That was clearly my fault…

Some people tried to argue that the distinction between the various kinds of test double is not interesting, that it doesn’t matter. I disagree. I think each kind has a different purpose and different situations when it is appropriate to use. If you can’t articulate what kind of test double you’re using, then there’s a very real danger you’re using it wrongly, or that better alternatives exist. Like – using several Mocks in the same test case, and finding it very fragile, when Stubs would be sufficient. Or – creating a new Stub for every test case, when it would be less work, and make for clearer tests, if you had a Fake that you could re-use in several.

So my conclusion from this quiz, and my other research on the subject, is that it’s worth using Meszaro’s definitions when discussing Test Doubles. A lot of programmers have a good working understanding of them, and do know the difference between a Stub and a Mock. So that’s very encouraging! One of the reasons Meszaros invented the “Test Double” terminology was to clear up the confusion that reigned at the time. It seems to me we’re in a much better position today because of his work. I do think there is more to do, though, I still see people using Test Doubles badly. Which is partly the motivation for my new book, which is about various techniques in Test Driven Development, not just Test Doubles actually. I’d better go and do some work on the section on Spies…

I blogged a while back about “Text-Based testing”, which is a variant of Test-Driven Development that I’ve used quite a bit. My husband, Geoff Bache, is developing several tools to support this style of development.

Recently, we met Llewellyn Falco and discovered the work he’s been doing with Approval Tests. We were all really excited to realize we’ve independently been working on something very similar. Llewellyn’s Approval Tests library is in some ways a unit-test version of Geoff’s tool TextTest which is probably more suited to integration or functional tests. What we’ve been calling “Text-Based Testing” I think is better described as “Text-Based Approval Testing”. I think it’s a particularly powerful technique for characterization tests of legacy code, and regression testing in general. Geoff’s latest tools also make it a viable approach for GUI testing, traditionally an area where people have difficulty doing pure TDD. (We’ll be talking about this at Eurostar in November.

I’ve written a fuller description of Approval Testing in a chapter of my work-in-progress book “Mocks, Fakes and Stubs”, but I’ll summarize here. In classic Test-Driven Development, you begin by defining a test case comprising three parts – “Arrange”, “Act”, “Assert”. The assertion generally takes the form assertEqual(expected, actual), and you calculate the expected value when you define the test case. Then you go away and implement the functionality, until the “actual” value matches “expected”, and the test passes.

With Approval Testing, you design the test case to the point of having “Arrange” and “Act”, but defer defining the “expected” value for the “Assert”. You take the approach of “I’ll know it when I see it”, and get on with implementing the code. When the actual value the code produces looks right, you “Approve” it – store the actual value in the test case.  So the assert statement becomes “assertEqual(approved, actual)”.

Text-Based Approval Testing
The value you approve on could be anything you can automatically diff the actual program output against – a file, a string, a screenshot, some json, contents of a database table… you name it. The thing is, plain text is wonderfully simple to diff, version control, merge, store, manipulate… and there’s a wealth of existing, well understood tools to do that. I guess that’s why Geoff’s tools only support plain text so far. His approach has always been that if your program produces output in a different format, you write a test fixture to convert it to plain text before you diff. Llewellyn’s tools have branched out more into diffing images and suchlike.

I think “Approval Testing” is a good name for the style of testing both Geoff and Llewellyn’s tools support. I like the implication that you explicitly approve the output from your program as correct, and use that as the basis for your test.

Other Approval Testers

Geoff and Llewellyn aren’t the only people using an Approval testing approach, either. Recently I led a workshop where we compared writing tests for the Gilded Rose Kata using both Cucumber and Approval Tests. Nat Pryce was there, and he later blogged about it. He speculates that Approval testing might solve some problems he’s seen with other kinds of testing. Nat has subsequently started developing a new approval testing tool, Pearlfish, so he can test his ideas.

There is also this recent screencast by Brett Slatkin from Google  who explains how he’s using an approval testing technique with image diffs to regression test his webapp. He says he finds this technique essential in a continuous delivery environment – these tests find bugs his other tests (both manual and automatic) miss entirely.

I have also found Approval testing to be a really useful technique, and I hope that simply having a good name for it will help people understand what it is. Perhaps you’ll realize it’s an approach you’ve already used, just without having a name for it. Or maybe you’ll be inspired to try out one of the tools I’ve mentioned.

Last week I was in Oxford at “Iverson College”, which is a conference on the topic of Array Language Programming. There were about 25 programmers there, most of whom are expert in one or more of APL, J, K, or Q. It’s not my usual comfort zone, put it that way! I’m fairly competent with a number of programming languages, notably Python and Java, but nothing I know is really much like these array languages. It’s been a huge culture shock, but in a good way, I think.

My main discoveries are that Array Programming is different again from Object Oriented Programming and Functional Programming, (although it has a lot in common with functional programming), and that this community contains some exceptional programmers. The total number of array language programmers is however extremely small and their work seems to be pretty much unknown to the wider programming community.

Array Programming Languages
I mentioned before four languages, APL, J, K and Q. They are similar to each other, kind of like Ruby and Python are similar to each other. I’ve gone through an introductory training in each language this week, largely given by the language designers themselves. I’d like to relate a little of what I’ve discovered about them.

APL
This is the oldest of the array languages, invented by Ken Iverson in the 1960s. It’s notorious for using an alphabet of funny-looking symbols to represent the built-in functions. You can try it out at http://tryapl.org – an interactive REPL (Read-Evaluate-Print-Loop) where you can put in snippets of code and see what the symbols do.

I thought at first that APL looked really intimidating and unnecessarily weird. Now having got to know it a little, I can see the benefits to the little symbols. They make the code really concise and unambiguous, and it doesn’t take long to learn their names. Once you can pronounce each symbol in your head as you read the code, it’s not much different from writing out the names in full in the editor.

The variant of APL that most of the conference attendees use is produced by the company Dyalog. I first met the CTO, Morten Kromberg, at an XP conference in 2006. He’s shown me some APL before, but this time I really got a chance to sit down with him and look at how he writes code. Dyalog APL has a powerful IDE including a REPL, where Morten showed me how he plays around with data and code, in order to come up with some useful APL expressions. When he’d got something working, he transfers code from the REPL into a file, to make it re-usable and shareable. It’s a familiar way of working to me, many Python programmers code this way, flipping between the REPL and a script file. It was a real pleasure to code with Morten – he is an extremely skilled programmer. Dyalog APL looks nice too, it has a fully-fledged IDE, and interfaces with .Net, Excel spreadsheets, ASP.net and more. It would fit nicely into the technology stack of many IT departments basically.

J
This was Ken Iverson’s next language, created together with Roger Hui, who now continues development of it. J is similar to APL in many ways, but is open source, and uses only ASCII characters. They’ve made an effort to make it open and less intimidating to newcomers, and probably for that reason, it’s the one I chose to download and try to learn before the conference.

I met Roger at breakfast on the first day of the conference, knowing nothing about who he was, he just said he was a programmer. I confessed that I’d downloaded J and made some joke about hoping I’d get on better with it than Ron Jeffries. (Ron wrote articles in his blog, about his efforts to learn J, and later gave up, finding it too hard!). Roger genuinely didn’t know who Ron Jeffries is, although he did know of the agile manifesto. He was very kind and concerned to help me to understand J though, (and Ron, if he wants!)

Despite my head start with J, by the end of the conference I found APL code easier to grasp – J seems more extreme to me. Roger calls J “executable mathematical notation”, and I’ve always been a bit more of an engineer than a mathematician.

K
K was invented by Arthur Whitney, who was also at the conference. I didn’t really get a feel for how the language works, more than that it’s extremely terse.

Arthur gave a talk at the conference, about his new project, KOS. He and two other guys are writing an operating system pretty much from scratch, using K, C, and bits of the linux kernel, (although they’d like to remove those). He showed us how you write applications for this new OS in K, by demonstrating building a text editor. He began from the alpha version of the OS with just a window manager, and a plain new window canvas that didn’t respond to any keyboard or mouse events.

Arthur added a line of K code to let you enter text into the window – a listener to key presses. Then a line of code to move the caret around with the arrow keys. Then a line of code for changing the font size. Then scrolling. Code to handle Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V to copy and paste text…. in the space of less than half an hour, he had an equivalent to notepad working. No compilation, no reloading. And the code was…. phenomenal. You can see a version of it here. I can’t read it really, it looks mostly like line noise to me. All his variable and function names are one or two characters, and K just seems pathologically terse.

I raised my hand and asked Arthur if he thought his code would be more readable if he used longer variable names? He thought for a moment, looking surprised and a little bewildered by the question. Then shook his head and said slowly “No. no. I don’t think I need that. I want to see all my code on the screen at once”. Needless to say, that was a big culture shock moment for me!

The size of the codebase is something all the array language programmers seem really concerned about, even if Arthur’s code is considered extreme even in that community. One thing I did later that week was take a piece of code that is in Robert C. Martin’s book “Clean Code”  (Args.java), as an example of clean Java code, and showed it to the group. There were general exclamations of “aargghh! that hurts my eyes!” but after a little while as I explained the structure of the code they seemed to appreciate it a little better. What they did say that intrigued me though, was that they automatically scanned the page looking for the symbols – the >, !, = signs – the parts that do something, as they put it. The other text they said obscures the structure, it distracts the eye. Yes, that’s right. Having names for the functions and variables makes the code less readable.

KDB+ and Q
KDB+ is a very small and fast commercial database largely used by financial institutions, also originally created by Arthur Whitney. Q is a kind of domain specific language built on top of K, that you use to query the data in a KDB+ instance.

I sat down with Attila Vrabecz, an experienced Q and KDB+ programmer, and we coded together for a couple of hours. We tackled a problem I’d previously coded with Morten in APL, to help me see what was different. There were many similarities – the workflow was the same for example – experimenting in the REPL before transferring the code into a more permanent, reusable form. I noticed Q has many more English words in it, fewer strange symbols, and Attila made more use of library functions than Morten did. It seems Q is designed to be approachable for a former SQL programmer, although once you scratch the surface, it’s much more like APL than SQL.

Test-Driven Development
I gave a talk at the conference about TDD. My aim was to provoke discussion, and argued that writing automated tests using TDD is the best approach. I was definitely successful at sparking a discussion! Actually, it didn’t seem the idea that programmers should write automated tests for their code was all that controversial, especially amongst the more seasoned developers present. We got way more hung up on how large a chunk of code counts as a “unit”, for your unit test, and what clean code looks like in an array language. To my eye, their units are large and their clean code is terse.

A challenge for the future
Dave Thomas, former lead developer for the Eclipse project, and general software visionary, is also an APL and K programmer. He flew in for just one day of the conference, and his talk functioned as the keynote address for the week – it was a clear challenge to the Array Languages community.

Dave painted a vision for the future where people will be living in a sea of big data they don’t understand, and lack adequate tools to query. He sees a great opportunity for array languages, which are generally very good at handling large amounts of data.

He ended his talk with an ambitious challenge to this community to get its act together, start being seen as a credible alternative, and grow. I could only applaud and agree – I found his advice insightful, and I hope the array languages community will do as he suggests.

I spent one very pleasant evening chatting with a woman who is about to embark on her PhD in atmospheric science. She’s hoping to use array languages to help her create software models that will execute quickly on huge arrays of multi-dimensional climate data. Her work sounds fascinating, and I hope it’s a sign of array languages starting to be used beyond their traditional niche in finance.

So I’m leaving the conference carrying a huge tome entitled “A complete introduction to Dyalog APL”, some pieces of code I’ve written, and good intentions to study further. I do find it fascinating that even with the little I know of it, APL allows me to think about and solve a problem differently than I do in Python. I anticipate I’ll find plenty of people in the Array Languages community willing to help me if I do continue to try to learn it. They’re an opinionated, quirky, mature, gentle, yet small bunch of extremely skilled programmers, and I’m glad to have met and coded with them.