Starting a new set of projects, what to do?

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Oct 29

Starting a new set of projects, what to do?

Monday, October 29, 2007 2:59 PM

So we're about to start several new projects at my client and I'm the project lead on several of them. This is a new mode of operation for this client as they usually have one-project/one-developer and any collaboration, code sharing, etc is accidental/side-effect.

I decided I was going to start fishing through various blog posts I had bookmarked, tagged, and such and I found that pretty much everything I wanted was on Jeremy Miller's blog.

I guess you can say that I'm a Jeremy fanboy, and you'd probably be right, but I'm hard pressed to find a better collection of links, articles, and summaries than on his blog.

I was faced with several problems. A few here for example:

How do I encourage medium-to-senior level developers who don't do a lot of unit testing to make the switch to TDD or near-TDD?
How do I introduce the concept of Continuous Integration?
How do I sell IoC/DI and similar design concepts (although, this usually goes hand-in-hand with serious unit testing as most alternatives make it very difficult to test)
How do I sell concepts like the 'Liskov Substitution Principle' without sounding like a complete, academic, pompous ass (who uses the word 'indeed' a lot and wears a tweed jacket).

Well, I started out trying to get ammo to answer some of these questions by using Google and, by and large, most of my queries returned a Jeremy post in the 1st-5th results.

At the end of the day, I came up with this rough outline of notes I took:

Getting Started, Gameplan

Design, and Design for Testability

Continuous Integration and Team Development

Using CI? Better do the "Check In Dance"

Unit Testing

Mocking in Unit Tests

Misc Semi-Related Helpful Articles

Testing loops with aggregated operations
Unit Testing and TDD Resources
TDD and Debugging
Invaluable Link-Dump (Chad: +100 on this link!)

P.S. - Anyone notice how almost NONE of these links have anything specifically to do with .NET, ASP.NET, etc?

Technorati Tags: alt.net, .net, altnetconf

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# re: Starting a new set of projects, what to do?

Chad,
You might find CI Factory helpful with getting CI up and running quickly.
http://www.cifactory.org 10/31/2007 6:12 AM | Jay Flowers

# re: Starting a new set of projects, what to do?

Hi Chad,

I'm in kind of the same boat - a couple of months ago I switched jobs into an organization full of really smart guys who generally don't practice XP techniques. I had a couple of luxuries afforded to me:

1) I happened to join the company at a time of relatively low development activity, so I spent some spare time writing a short whitepaper called Continuous Integration: Benefits and Practices. I sent it to the guys on the team I thought would be most sympathetic to the cause and started talking up the CI cause to them and others. Thankfully, they were already using NAnt a bit for builds, so CI was a short leap.

2) More recently I was added to a greenfield project over which I have some design authority - not total authority, but certainly a large influence. I let it be known among my team members that I had testabililty high on my list of design goals for this project. Without asking anyone I set up CruiseControl.Net on my box, added a unit test project to our solution, and introduced my teammates to Jeremy's check-in dance. I also made up the game of CI Golf to keep it fun - whoever has caused the least number of broken builds at the end of an iteration gets beer courtesy of the rest of the team. My manager has taken notice and gotten us a machine we can use to spin up dedicated VM's for CI, and he wants me to design an automated deployment strategy using NAnt and CruiseControl, and other teams here are asking for my help in setting up CI for their projects.

It hasn't gone perfectly - you can read an example of that here:
http://groups.google.com/group/RhinoMocks/browse_thread/thread/e39225a12dd83d82

But I'm taking trying to take the approach of advocating rather than agitating. I'm diving in and proving the theories I'm espousing by writing lots of test code. And I'm generally winning acceptance for automated testing, mocking dependencies in unit tests, etc - one of the guys I feared would push back the most spoke up in a department meeting recently and offered an eloquent argument about the need for more developer testing. I'm encouraged by progress like that.

I guess I would say from my experience that I would grab a toehold on practices like CI that have an immediate positive impact on the team, and then be grateful for small victories. Hopefully they'll get hooked on the increase in quality and stability, and they will want to pick it up for themselves and learn more. Then the design principles that lend to more testable code will be more palatable to the team. My ultimate goal is to have folks here sending ME blog posts and berating ME for writing tightly-coupled code - that's when all my assertions will pass.

Don't know if any of this helps, but I can certainly empathize with you.

11/2/2007 5:43 PM | Dale Smith

# re: Starting a new set of projects, what to do?

@Jay: Awesome! Thanks. I think our server will be allocated (VM world) soon and I'll definitely use that to bootstrap the CI!

@Dale: Sounds like you're in a great position: Supportive (or at least skeptical but not obtrusive) management, a team willing to listen but requires proof (which is fine because the proof is there).

Soon they'll become test infected because they realize how beneficial it is to have change confidence (rather than grinding to a halt due to refactoring fear paralysis).

Keep posting about it and let us know how it turns out. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE share your experience and what finally won over certain folks. That info will be invaluable to other people leading teams trying to convince skeptics as to the value of these practices! 11/3/2007 5:34 PM | Chad Myers

# re: Starting a new set of projects, what to do?

Chad

Nice post man. And I think it very much answers some of the questions we've been talking about in terms of filling in the knowledge gaps. 11/3/2007 9:10 PM | Scott

# re: Starting a new set of projects, what to do?

I have found Jeremy's blogs an extraordinary rich vein of instruction and inspiration for the last two years, not just for the quality but also the quantity. I fear he violates one of the XP practices - to blog at a SUSTAINABLE pace. 11/5/2007 12:29 AM | Stephen Smith

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