Paul Grenyer

11am Thursday 29th December 2011 Come and see me at Agile Cambridge . Session Starting with an (almost) clean IDE Paul will develop a Walking Skeleton. The walking skeleton was described by Alistair Cockburn as "... a tiny implementation of the system that performs a small end-to-end function. It need not use the final architecture, but it should link together the main architectural components. The architecture and the functionality can then evolve in parallel." It is also one of the theme's in Freeman & Pryce's Growing Object Orientated Software Guided by Tests . In this session Paul will start with an (almost) clean IDE and develop a walking skeleton for a simple application and demonstrate how Test Driven Development (TDD) can be used even at the system level to test features. Profile Husband, father, software consultant, author, testing and agile evangelist. Paul has been programming in one form or another for over 20 years and ha...

This month’s ACCU London was at 7City to hear Ed Sykes tell us about a couple of C++ mocking frameworks, MockIt Now and HippoMock . Ed is a very relaxed, confident speaker and the code and demonstrations he used were simple, straight forward and easy to understand. I mostly came a long to meet Ed as he’s an excellent contributor to the ACCU and specifically the Mentored Developers projects. Ed obviously hit a chord with the audience and there was plenty of interaction and question asking. There were even a few tangents that Ed handled brilliantly. It looks like both of these frameworks use quite a bit of compiler magic and function pointer repointing, along with macro magic to achieve in C++, what is easily achieved with reflection in the likes of Java and C#. Following the short presentation there was a long discussion on the more general topic of mock objects. Even though I haven’t used C++ for a little while, this presentation was absolutely fascinating and I will definitely be u...

While collaborating on a new article I was recently pointed in the direction of Behavior Driven Development (BDD) by Chris O’Dell . I only thought I had a vague idea of what it was before and I got so absorbed in Behavior Driven Development on Wikipedia and Dan North’s Introducing BDD today that I missed my stop on the tube. I never miss my stop on the tube! There are two main points that stood out for me. I usually develop software inside out. Start with the model and then add the user interfaces on top. Dan North tells us that the first thing that we should do is get the user interface going and then show it to the customer/user to get immediate feedback. This is actually far more sensible as the user interface is what the users see and use, so they can tell you if it’s right or how it needs to be changed. Then you can develop the model to suit, rather than the other way around. For while now I have been looking for a good way to record acceptance criteria with user stories and I t...

After three wonderful years working with Java I am back in the C# arena and amazed by how things have changed. When I was working with C# previously it was with .Net 1.1 and as I return .Net 4 is ready to go. I started a new contract and my client suggested that to get ahead of the game I should learn Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the latest Microsoft framework for creating Windows desktop (and web) applications. It replaces the likes of Windows Forms on the desktop. Two of the major features of WPF are that it is rendered entirely on a computer's graphics card and separates presentation from presentation logic. Manning is my preferred technical book publisher, so I bought the PDF version of WPF In Action with Visual Studio 2008 and read it on my Kindle. It is a great introduction to producing Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) with WPF, but I later discovered that although Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) is covered, the detail is not great. The MVVM pattern is similar to Marti...

Tonight kicked off with the usual high quality lightening talks that I have come to expect form the London Java Community . The two main presenters spoke individually about the cloud solutions that their individual companies offered. I know little to nothing about cloud computing. The emphasis was centred around Platform As A Service (PaaS). It appears that most of the major players (Amazon, google, etc) do not provide a private PaaS for testing and development. I find this astounding, despite the fact that I have worked with at least one major vendor who makes it very expensive to have a development environment, but at least it was still possible. The stronger of the two systems described seemed to be the offering from SpringSource . Peter Ledbrook (Grails Advocate and ACCU Mentored Developers mentor) is a very interesting speaker. He has clearly been bitten by live demos not working in presentations before and, alas, he was bitten again tonight. Although, the previous speaker als...

Paul Grenyer & Chris O’Dell "I know what you’re thinking: “Is that two tests or only one.” Well, to tell the truth, in all this agility, I’m not sure myself. But this is Test Driven Development, the most power development technique in the world, and could give you clean code, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel expressive? Well, do ya, punk?" Paul: I have a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application that loads a list of widget names from a database and uses them to populate a drop down box. There is no default widget, so the user must select one from the list and click the load button to load it. The behavior is such that before a widget name is selected the button is disabled and cannot be clicked. One pattern often employed in WPF applications is Model-View-ViewModel . The view model can use variations of the Command Pattern for processing commands from and giving feedback, such as the enabled state of a button, to the View. MVVM is intended to ...

Tonight was mostly about entertainment and Robert C. Martin had me in stitches for most of the evening. He started off, as I gather he often does, by seeing who in the room could recite PI to any number of decimal places and how he lost a PI off to Herb Sutter . Throughout his talk Uncle Bob mentioned most of the languages and paradigms of the last 60+ years and gradually brought us to the idea that nothing much that was really new has come about since around 1965. He went on to tell us that he thought that programming would converge into a single language. He even told us what that language would be, but I'm not going to spoil his surprise. If you ever get the chance, go and listen to Uncle Bob! It's 100% geeky fun with a serious message. And I got my copy of Clean Code signed. See the video here .

Hyde Park, Sunday 3rd July 2011. I was only meant to be playing the role of taxi driver, but after most of the party dropped out, my wife talked me into going to Hyde Park to see Pulp with her. I wasn't really looking forward to it as I was expecting a 90 minute set with probably only a couple of songs I knew. I couldn't have been more wrong! There were only a couple of songs I didn't know! We got to the festival just in time to catch Grace Jones . The best that can be said about her is that she has a great voice, but bad songs. She finished with a Roxy Music cover of Love Is The Drug and Slave to the Rhythm, so it wasn't all bad. By the time Grace left the stage we'd been allocated some seats. Sometimes having a pregnant wife is an advantage! I really wasn't expecting Pulp to do the big arena/festival thing either, but they did. They started with a big black curtain in front of the stage onto the back (stage side) of which they shone a lazer. A camera replaye...

We enjoyed the first transformers film, but didn't think much of the second. However the trailer for Transformers Dark Side of the Moon was excellent. The first ten minutes of the film, which featured the first moon landing, was superb. Then the film fell apart. It's not just that the Witwickey character is rubbish or the fact that the Autobots are a bit soft, but the language, the sex and the violence is way too much for a 12A. Having seen the first two films we thought we were in safe territory. We'd taken our son for his 8th birthday, along with a friend, and my wife and I were wincing most of the way through. The language was very frequent and gratuitous, including at least one use of the F word. There was a lot of flesh on show in the opening scenes with Whitwiky. Once the film got going, there was a lot of gratuitous violence, including Transformers machine gunning humans in an office block through the window and Transformers vaporising humans leaving only a skull ...

Please go along and read this new blog post by Agile Coach Rachel Davies on When To Write Story Tests .

Threshold are simply amazing. Ok, so they are my favourite band, so I may be a little biased. I have seen them six times now, almost as many times as I've seen Terrorvision and the Wildhearts , and they get better every time. Threshold should be playing places much, much bigger places than The Peel in Kingston, but I am so glad they aren't. In these tiny venues you can get right up and personal with the band. Not only that, but the band walked into the Pizza restaurant my friends and I were enjoying before the gig, Damian Wilson was on the door talking, as he always is and the remainder of the band were reportedly in the bar signing stuff after the gig. With no support they played a stonking two hour set with something from every album except Psychedelicatessen: Slipstream The Ravages of Time Long Way Home The Destruction of Words Hollow Sanity's End Falling Away Clear Ground Control (acoustic version) Pressure The Art of Reason This Is Your Life Pilot in the Sky of Dr...