November 2005 - Posts
Sam wrote an interesting post on Estimating Frustrations on Agile Project + Fit. What’s even a more interesting piece to read (at least in my opinion) is James Shore’s vision on Fit. What I like in particular is the tight integration between the test-team and the development-team. Currently the Fit document is often considered to be the intellectual property of the test-team. The domain knowledge captured while composing this document and the resulting software stays within the individual teams until acceptance testing begins… then all of a sudden both teams need to have a mutual understanding of what the application actually solves and how the software's problem solving capabilities match up against the domain. Not to mention the translations involved since they missed the opportunity to live by the One Language rule (Ubiquitous Language). This barrier is broken by the Fit Workflow process. I’m not sure whether the described Fit process is suitable for large and complex applications. All in all very interesting!
To be continued...
What makes this meeting so special? Michiel will talk about the future of dotNED and the opportunity to win books! And on top of that there will be talks focusing on techniques to improve the quality of your code (sounds like Code Complete).
Sign up here.
Jimmy blogs about Role/snapshot objects at the boundaries of aggregates. For example a product is associated with an OrderLine resulting in a ProductOfALineItem object (value object). Isn’t the ProductOfALineItem class an implementation of a context-specific view on the Product object namely the Role Object Pattern?
Roy mentioned an article by Jeremy Miller discussing the order of code construction. Frans commented and although I agree with Frans on the first part I tend to disagree on the second. What I extracted from Jeremy’s article by reading between the line is that big (half the project) upfront research including business case, requirements understanding etc eventually lead to these so called "Frameworks". Sounds familiar (and yes I know my team is reading this :D). I’ve seen it happen on my current project…
We needed a solution to be able to deploy in this awkward hosting environment (CMS system). Sounds reusable right? So we gathered developers with to much time on their hands to build something impressive with the RequirementsOfTheMoment (how patternish) in scope. Then all of a sudden the business steps in and forms a clear picture of the business case. The pressure gets on in order to saddle up features… no time to maintain the framework with all these changing requirements, and we all know to what this leads. Exactly, phrases like “can’t we just go around the framework?” or “this would be easier without the framework” or even worse “we need to get [Some Guy] to change the framework first”.
Jeremy is relying on his experience in which I can find myself. He writes:
* Unfortunately they blundered by crafting an iteration plan that called for them to write the entire data access layer first, the business layer second, then finally put together the user interface. It failed miserably.
* This is a terrible example of working iteratively. The idea of working iteratively and incrementally is to build fully working pieces of the application, one at a time. What they did was just BDUF + Waterfall with some trappings of iterative development.
One of the traps developers fall into these days is the Agile but Not Quite Yet syndrome. Jeremy explains this AbNQY syndrome using his framework, workflow and VB6 shop examples. We’ve had a lot of good discussions amongst our team why we had fallen into this trap ourselves and under what circumstances it is most likely to do so. My proposal for a follow up post.
Douglas Purdy advised the WCF people to move over to the MSDN Forums. He says
The product team monitors the forum on a daily basis.
In the future, it would be wonderful if questions could be posted over
there.
It will help us get you a response quicker (we just have to monitor one
location).
and I happen to agree on this. I tried the forums a while ago but found it “to new” back then. Sergey Korkin suggested synchronization between the newsgroups and forums *hint*. MS, while you’re working on that synchronization feature also add syndication.
Last week while giving my Principles and Patterns talk I received lost of positive feedback. In the first part I explained the history of principles and patterns, usage guidance, and gave book tips. In the second part I demonstrated the State Pattern using an IfElse, Switch and StatePattern example based on my customer’s domain. The most interesting thing was the fact that all attendees agreed on the need for a pattern-based solution, and that no one thought of using patterns to solve it initially. We still have a lot of evangelising to do in order to bring order in the Principles and Patterns chaos.
Scott Hanselman's excellent presentation tip to increase the font size in Visual Studio.NET 2005 doesn't work.
This weekend I gave the virtual Team System labs (Build a Domain Specific Language Designer Using the DSL Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2006 Virtual Lab), which I mentioned earlier here, a try. The virtual lab setup makes for an impressive training environment. Highly recommended for those who want to get their hands on the latest developer tools and technologies! It saves you from the countless hours setting up a stable VPC environment with the frequent CTP drops. Unfortunately it gave me (as the documentation mentioned) build errors, so I’ll give it another try later this week.
It appears that Steve Cook, Alan Cameron Wills, Gareth Jones and Stuart Kent are working on a new book covering Microsoft’s new horse namely DSL’s. Steve in particular is very interested on what topics this book should cover. Lately I have the feeling that Model Driven Development (MDD) is taking us by storm. If the Microsoft camp isn’t ready for Domain Driven Development (DDD) it is certainly not ready for MMD. So I think it is extremely important to educate developers in the DDD direction to let them succeed in MDD.
Stuart Kent mentions on his blog that the DSL Tools for VSNET 2005 RTM will be available within the next two or three weeks. For the time being you can try the virtual Team System labs.
More Posts
Next page »