Pramod Sadalage, has written an article on Behaviour Driven DB development. http://www.methodsandtools.com/archive/archive.php?id=78.

He writes about adding behaviour to the domain model and how that behaviour is translates into database objects, with tests. In the project I'm working on, which driven by a Web UI I use the UI behaviour to build the presenter and  through this add behaviour to the domain model. It's at the last stage that I add the persistance, through Nhibernate.

here is a random thought I had today.

From what I've seen, in the past 2 years, agile practices have spread among the .Net community.  The .Net framework  gives us the power to do TDD and follow other agile principles.  the community is now empowered with a rich API , so that we don't have to worry about how to build things.  We now have to worry about what we can build and how to build it better.

We have been freed from the shackles of VB and classic asp, with a good OO framework, that is getting better. You name the problem and there is a very good .Net based tool to help you solve it. You want mocking , you have Rhino Mocks, you want persistence you have NHibernate, you want testing APIs, you have Nunit, Mbunit and what not. 

The technology and tools to build better software is here, are you using it ? if not what's stopping you ?

When to make design decisions is a touchy subject when doing iterative software development.  Ever since starting to do TDD, I’ve seen how TDD can drive the design. I’ve also seen how bad it is when a team gets caught in the trap of doing a big up front design. Two bits of advice that have helped me a lot in my current project are;

Doing the simplest thing that could possibly work

Defer decisions till the last possible moment.

What I’m still trying to learn  is;

What is the simplest thing that could work, but doesn’t increase the cost of change later. What is the simplest thing I could do, but still gives me a foundation to build upon ?

How long can I defer a decision ? How do I avoid leaving a decision till too late ?

A panel discussion led by Martin Fowler sheds some light on this. You can watch it here, and it is a must see. The panel talks about  these two topics and their experiences.

What I gleaned from this is , doing the simplest thing does not mean doing the stupidest thing. Doing the simplest thing possible is under the constraints of proper separation of concerns, encapsulation and having tests to cover what is written.

Doing the simplest thing does not mean you can dump your business logic, persistance and presentation logic all in the code behind file of an ASP .Net page. Keep doing the simplest thing possible by using existing design patterns that reduce the cost of change later. The simplest thing is not an excuse for writing bad code. Having proper separation of concerns in the design ensures that changes can be made in  the simplest thing that was done earlier without adversely affecting the rest of the system. 

The domain model should not be aware of the persistance or presentation logic. Design decisions don’t affect the domain model design as frequently as other parts of the system. The domain model reflects the business and the decisions are usually made long before the project is begun.

Doing the simplest thing that could possibly work usually means, how to persist a certain part of the domain model ? how to present domain model data ? and how to pass the data from the domain model to and from the different layers. It is how to implement a certain business requirement in domain model code.

A key safeguard here is having tests (unit and acceptance tests ).  While doing the simplest thing possible do write good unit tests.

Martin Fowler talks about reversibility in design decisions. A good design decision is one that you can reverse and go back to the point before the decision was made. He stresses encapsulation again.  Design decisions that are encapsulated are not expensive to change. If your persistance medium is changed, this decision should not affect the rest of the system. Proper separation of concerns isolates design decisions. The panel also stresses the importance of spiking. If you have choices to make, try those choices with a scaffold or a simple prototype and explore the options. It’s much more cost effective to make a decision through spiking than to undo a choice made to production code. Again the emphasis is made on tests. Tests protect the system, they tell you how much you are likely to break. 

During the past week a colleague of mine, did a fairly big refactoring of key parts of the code. He did it in a separate branch, and made sure that all the existing tests passed and wrote new tests where needed. Impressive. His design decisions do not affect the trunk, till we are sure that we are happy with it and it hasn’t broken any part of the system.

In my current project I defer decisions till the first hint of pain of not making that decision appears. I make  the choice just about when we are starting to hurt by not making it. I keep postponing it till then.

To sum it all up;

Do the simplest thing that could possibly work, do not repeat yourself defer decisions till the last possible moment, but still do write the best code you can, and drive the design with tests.

In the past two months I've been introducing new practices to my team. An important one was a branching strategy.  My team works on several user stories in a sprint. A sprint lasts 2 weeks ( 10 days).  I wanted to release regularly at the end of each sprint. 

Prior to implementing the branching strategy,  the team worked off the trunk and released from it.  This made the trunk less stable with in-complete features.  The code was unit tested but not complete.

We wanted to have better control of what we were releasing for acceptance testing and to the production environment.  Releasing the latest version in the trunk caused in-complete code go into a production environment. The strategy I introduced is explained very well in this article. I highly recommend reading this and using it as a starting point if you are working in an agile manner.

To summarise;

All development work is done in a development branch. For example, when developing  a story, the work is done in a branch for the story. The branch is merged back into trunk when the story is complete (acceptance tested, unit tested, as long as it has met the requirements and is relatively bug free with no show stoppers).  During development the developers working on the story branch pull down from the trunk so that they are always in synch with the trunk. When the story is done, the branch is merged back into the trunk and killed off.  Several stories can be in development in parallel branches too.

The advantage of this approach is that the trunk is kept relatively clean and has feature complete code ready to release. This makes life much easier for the testers as they have complete stories to test.

Now this all sounds fine, but it didn't go smoothly as I expected.

First off, most of my team had a steep learning curve in trying to branch and merge. We were working with TFS (Team Foundation Server) at the time. Creating a branch with TFS was a time consuming task. It took a good 10 to 15 minutes to create a new branch from the trunk and commit it back in to TFS.

The next biggest stumbling block for my team was the actual act of merging. Some found it hard to be disciplined and pull down from the trunk regularly, and to always do this first when merging a branch back into the trunk.

TFS wasn't very helpful in when resolving conflicts, it tends get confused when the merge contained renamed files.

A drawback of such an aggressive branching strategy was sharing code was hard. Improvements or refactored code made in one branch code not be shared by other branches. The code had to go into the trunk first before being pulled down by the other branches.

So at the end of two months where am I ?

I decided not to branch so aggressively. Each story did not have to have a branch of its own. The general policy when creating branches is;

1. Does the story depend on other stories in development ? If yes, use an existing branch.

2. Will starting a new piece of work impact the release of an existing story ? Will it cause the release of one story to contain an incomplete feature of another story ? If yes, the new piece of work belongs in a new branch.

3. Is the new work a bug fix ? Bug fixes on code already released are always in the trunk.

In general, we have settled on "work branches". Branches that can have independent releasable pieces of work. At most we have two branches at any given point in time. Usually there is a branch with work carried over from the previous sprint and all the new work for the current sprint is done in a new branch.

We also ditched TFS and moved to Subversion. This move was done last week, and my team is still settling into it. Creating branches with subversion is a snap. It was very easy to switch Cruise Control .Net to use subversion. We haven't still moved to subversion 1.5 and have to track the merge revision numbers manually.

 

If you don't have a branching strategy, first consider if you really need one. If you do, and you are working in an agile manner start off with the approaches in this article.

1. Enforce strict discipline and synchronise branches regularly.

2.No branch should go without merging back into the trunk at-least once every two days.

3. Listen to the pain points of the team.

4.I highly recommend paring with another developer when merging back into the trunk. Have a merge buddy.

5. Always merge locally and not on the server, run unit tests and then check back in.

6. The chances of a merge going wrong and loosing both the unit test and  the code being tested is very little. A compile error will always spot this.

7. Run CI on each branch. Treat each branch with the same respect as the trunk. 

8. Don't let your team treat a branch as place to check-in untested code.

9. If your tools are giving you pain, change them.

Most of all listen to the pain the team is having but stick with the process. Don't drop it because it's hard.

Listen and adapt.

When trying to order pizza today, I get this error on the Pizza Hut web site. The site crashed when making my transaction , and I had to call the bank  to check if the transaction went through.

Is it really that hard to show some care when  running a web site ? I mean, it doesn't take a lot to turn on  Custom Error pages on the web.config and turn off debug mode. Having this sort of error shown on a public web site that is getting a lot of traffic shows lack of care, lack of planning and un-professionalism by whoever built and runs this site. Expecting something to fail and handling the failure gracefully shows that the developer has planned for the unexpected. But not in this instance.  From this it is likely that the site owners didn't use some decent infrastructure to handle fail over, they didn't think of what could go wrong. I was still getting this for about an hour means that they don't have anyway of getting notified to fix it. 99% uptime ? Nah, not for us.

Would I trust my credit card details with them again ? Nope..

Maybe it was because they used business objects written by Van Halen.