Agile Developer Venkat's Blog

Speaking at BJUG

I will be speaking at Boulder JUG this evening (July 8, 2008). The details of my presentation are here. In the "Know Your Java?" session I will show some tricky parts of Java. The "Testing with Groovy" will be totally ZePo (Zero Powerpoint) presentation where I will show how to use Groovy for testing Java and Groovy code. It is good to be home after a long time and I look forward to meeting some of the bright software developers of CO this evening.

PAD among top books

This morning I got an email
_{"I thought you might get a kick to see that your (and Andy’s) book was named one of
the Top 100 Software Engineering books of all time (#49). They determined it
based on variables, such as Amazon rank and number of Jolt awards, etc.

The article is up on dotnetkicks or the direct link is http://www.noop.nl/2008/06/top-100-best-software-engineering-books-ever.html.

Congratulations,

Zach"}

Thanks Zach. It is not only nice to see PAD appear in the list (among other excellent Pragmatic Bookshelf books), but nice to see a list of good books in one place for those interested in learning and keeping up.
Speaking of which, I can't wait to be at AgileIT X. There will be some great speakers there and several exciting topics. I am looking forward to give five talks and workshop, but also listening and discussing with others who will be there. Can't wait for Thursday.

Generics in Java

I have talked and written about my opinions on Java Generics before (I love Generics in .NET, but that love does not extend to the implementation in Java).

Type information is useful at times, and I like for a way to infer that information. Generics provide that, but is too heavyweight of an approach and also leads to an illusion of type safety when it provides none. If all we care about is type information, there's gotta be a better way to realize that.

Brian gives a good example where having the type information can be useful—How Generics can pay dividends. But, is that a dividend or is it a tax allowance? Are Generics the best way to get type information/type inference or should there be a lightweight, better way?

DSL Article-Part I

I am writing a DSL article for the Java World.
The part I of the article "Creating DSLs in Java, Part 1: What is a domain-specific language?" is posted here.

On Manual Testing

I have been talking testing to several programmers and testers recently. One common observation is, at least among those I've spoken to, most software testing is manual. When I ask why, I hear "because somethings are hard to automate." OK, somethings are hard to automate, so we have close to zero automation is not right. They agree that manual testing is painful and not effective, yet continue to manally repeat it every day.

“Error rate in manual testing is comparable to the bug rate in the code being tested.”—Boriz Beizer.

Why not consider using tools like Selenim and Watir (or Watin)? Why not look at using tooks like FIT, FITNesse, easyb, ...?

The latter tools will force the UI to be as thin as paper, meaning, will push the business logic to layer below and enable automated tests.
You can realize this using patterns like MVP or Model View Presenter pattern.

What seems to be lacking is either the realization or the motivation to automate. I am calling on these testers to get angry if they are testing the software manually.

Testers should focus on authoring tests and not running them—they should leave the running for computers to do, automatically.

What's blocking you?

Please think of us, the users

I am a coder at heart. I like to twiddle bits, do cool stuff at the language, API, and lower levels. I am terrible when it comes to creating good user experience, but I know that.
So, when I create apps, I ask others to use it. I ask them what they like, what they don't like, and what they'd like to see improve. And, I do this from the first day I start writing the app. I know that user involvement is one of the key to success.

What is a good application? I'd say it is the one that lets you get your job done. You don't even feel like you're using the application or tool. You get in there and it enables you to focus and get what you want to get done, and stays out of your way.

Sometimes the usability of an application, or the lack there of, is so obvious, you wonder if any real person ever used it before it went into production. I experienced, or I should say endured, one such application recently at the Bangalore airport.

I was going to write more about it, but Naresh took the lead and wrote it already! So, thanks Naresh, I will simply link to his story here.

So, the next time you are ready to write some code, I have a kind favor to ask. Please, please, involve your users or at least think about them and their experience.

Passenger on the first day of a new airport

Saturday was a historic day in Bangalore, India—the opening of BIA, the new Bangalore International Airport. Among hopes, and protests, the new airport started its operation past mid night on May 24th.

That's the day when I took a one day trip to Mumbai with Naresh Jain (who organized the meeting) to speak at the Agile Software Community, Mumbai Chapter.

I have to say, for the first day of operation, I was very impressed (though I am sure there was quite a bit of pain for several travelers). Yes, my flight both ways was delayed by a couple of hours, but, hey, when was my flight not delayed?

When Naresh, his colleagues, and I got to the airport, we had an interesting experience at the automated check-in system (I will blog about this separately next). So we stood in lines to get our boarding pass.

After a delay we found that the porters had not showed up to move the bags. Naresh quickly realized we had no bags to checkin. So, he moved up to the front of the line and asked them to complete our checkin first. So, the two of us were the first to get the boarding pass:

Then we entered through the security into the large, modern terminal. The airport is huge and they have done a great job with the facilities.

We had a nice breakfast in the "Time Out" food court. The flight delay gave us a good opportunity to rant about software development and testing.

Overall, I am impressed at the new airport and was thrilled to be part of the first day of operations.
I will have an opportunity to see how the airport is at the end of the first week of operations, as I fly out of Bangalore on Friday.

Discussions on Evolutionary Design

I had a great time meeting some of the fine software developers in Bangalore and Mumbai last week.
On Wednesday evening (May 21st), I spoke to the Agile Software Community of India, Bangalore chapter (thanks to the good folks at Binary Essentials for sponsoring that event) and on yesterday (May 24th), I spoke at their Mumbai chapter (thanks to the kind folks at Directi for sponsoring that event).

The topic of discussion was on Evolutionary Design. There were several good questions in Bangalore, and quite a few intense discussions in Mumbai. Overall, I was very impressed at the desire of the attendees to learn and share their knowledge (we did not clear the room until 11:30PM on Wednesday and I was literally dragged out yesterday to avoid missing my flight).

Good design is critical to agile development. I briefly talk about that here. You can view the slides from my site download page. I will be fine turning that talk further for my presentation at the Agile IT in Reston, coming up in a few weeks.

At Developer Summit next week

I am looking forward to speaking at the Developer Summit next week in Bangalore.

I will be giving five focused 1 hour presentations and two 3-hours workshops on topics ranging from .NET Gotchase, Harnessing DSLs, Patterns in Java and Groovy, Tools for Agile Development, Code Quality, Functional Programming, and Dynamic Languages on the JVM.

While there, I will be speaking at the Agile Software Community in Bangalore (21st) and Mumbai (24th).

This is going to be a three week trip—following the conference I am teaching an Agile course in Bangalore for a client and then a short course in Hyderabad.

I look forward to meeting some good speakers and software developers from around the world next week in Bangalore.

Refactoring Ugly Groovy Code

A few weeks ago I was writing a method in Groovy that needed to return three different results, two strings and one array. As I was writing it, I said to myself, "this code is ugly, I wish I could return multiple values from methods in Groovy."

Here is an example similar to the method I had written:

def details(full_name, address, contact_numbers)
{
// ignoring stuff to process data
full_name.append('Venkat Subramaniam')
address.append("Venkat's address")
contact_numbers << 'phone_number_1'
contact_numbers << 'phone_number_2'
contact_numbers << 'phone_number_3'
}

To use the above method I had to write something like:

def full_name = new StringBuilder()
def address = new StringBuilder()
def contact_numbers = []

details(full_name, address, contact_numbers)

Today, I got around to refactoring my code, thanks to the Groovy 1.6 (beta 1) facility to return multiple results from a method. The above example,
refactored looks like below:

def details()
{
// ignoring stuff to process data
['Venkat Subramaniam', "Venkat's address", ['phone_number_1', 'phone_number_2', 'phone_number_3']]
}

And I can call it as follows:

def full_name, address, contact_numbers

[full_name, address, contact_numbers] = details()

Simple, less noisy, elegant, and my refactored code does not look (that) ugly anymore.

In Groovy 1.6 (beta1), if a method returns an ArrayList, you can assign it to an ArrayList made up of variables you'd like to assign the values to.

If there are fewer elements on the lhs, the extra values in the result are ignored. If there are more elements, the extra elements in the lhs are assigned null.

I think this is nice step in the right direction. I hope there is a way to capture the extra elements on the rhs into an array.