Startup secrecy

SHHHHHHHHHHHHH. Please NO talking about the company to anyone. No blogging, talking, posting, emailing about the company’s particulars, etc…


A note I got today warning us of the terrific need for secrecy around the company that was created at the Bloomington Startup Weekend this past weekend. I ended up not being able to participate in any meaningful sense, except maybe for a few hours on Friday night, so I don't know what any of the big secrets are that they need to keep, but one thing I do know is that

there is no business model that is so unique and different that no one has ever thought about it before.

Creating a successful business is about execution, and sweat equity, not about the new and exciting business model. All this sort of insistence on secrecy does is shut down any potential buzz that would be created. I mean, you've got 75 or so people who are probably, or hopefully, really excited about the application they've put together. They should be blogging, twittering, discussing how excited they are about the company. That is a lot of people for a small town like Bloomington - the buzz would probably have a multiplicative effect and people might even start up a buzz about a buzz, so to speak. But they're blowing it by telling everyone that they can't post, can't talk, can't even email.

The PR people and/or the lawyers are probably telling them that they need to present a consistent message, need to prevent any chance of being sued for patent infringement, need to be safe, need to be careful. Sorry, folks, being careful isn't how you create a successful startup. That comes from being bold and taking chances.

I got a separate note telling me I needed to fill out more forms in order to claim the share of the company that I qualified for on Friday night. Meh. I don't think I'll bother.

Bloomington Startup Weekend

Wow, looks like the Bloomington Startup Weekend is proceeding apace. It was announced today as an official part of the Startup Weekends that have been going on around the country - there was one in West Lafayette, wonder if their company made boilers - after a voting process where more than 150 people voted for Bloomington over various other cities. They're looking for around 70 people signing up, with all sorts of different skills: developers, designers, PR people, lawyers, managers; and once the group gets together on Feb. 8th, they'll brainstorm some ideas for a product, and hopefully go ahead and get it built! Good luck to them. I'm sure I'll sign up, and maybe even make some useful contributions, although I need to clear it with my boss first. I have a feeling that the weekends in places like New York tended to be from dissatisfied people working at Merril Lynch or IBM or places like that, but I work for a company that may have less employees than this weekend will have attendees, and it's a really cool company too. (Want a job at Envisage?) So I'm not looking to make my fortune from this weekend, but it should be fun.

The week before that we'll have a geek dinner, so I'm guessing the Startup Weekend will be a topic of conversation there too. Hope to see you at El Norteno!

A Facebook feed for the open web

I really don't care that much for Facebook. I don't watch enough movies to take the little quizzes, and I'm not really all that interested in throwing a vampire at my friends, or whatever those weird little applications are supposed to be. I hear that some people use it for professional networking, but most of the pros I know are on LinkedIn, and so am I, and that seems to be sufficient. Not like I have a zillion contacts, but all I really want to know for most of these people is where they live, where they work, and how I can get hold of them if I need to. LinkedIn works brilliantly for that.

I do like the Facebook minifeeds, though. A minifeed, if I understand correctly, is an aggregation of all the things that a Facebook user is doing on Facebook - updating status, adding friends, using applications. For each friend, getting updates on what they're doing moment-by-moment on Facebook is interesting, and the Facebook homepage aggregates all my friends' feeds into a single one and sorts it by time. So when I do log on to Facebook, I can see at a glance what all these people are doing, at least in the last few hours.

Picture by Somewhat Frank

But there's plenty of stuff on the open web that could go into a minifeed just as easily. A lot of sites are making sure they have Facebook applications now, but not every one, and

who wants to rely on a Facebook app for something that isn't really anything more than an RSS feed?

So, I decided to put my own life-feed together. Unfortunately, finding an application that simply turns a bunch of RSS and Atom feeds into one publically available feed turned out to be harder than I expected. If you know of an easy solution, tell me about it - but keep in mind that of the first four feeds I tried to combine, three were sufficiently different to bring down every solution I tried - those are Google Reader shared items, this blog, and my LibraryThing book reviews.

I ended up creating a web page directly rather than creating a feed - I didn't feel like learning all the ins-and-outs of RSS or Atom. So, if you want to follow my life, almost minute by minute, check out this page - or just check out my home page, which has a small iframe in it with that page in it, which is how I intended to use the feed anyway. You can't subscribe to my life just yet, but maybe that will be coming soon!

Along with my feeds mentioned above, the page aggregates Twitter posts, and soon I'll add my Flickr pictures and maybe Delicious , Coastr, or Zelky if they have the feeds in the format I need. I'm looking forward to having my own life feed!

Pair Programming vs. Code Reviews

Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror is asking for comments on the relative efficiency of these processes. We do both at my company, and while I don't think I have anything truly original to add, I come down on the agile side of the discussion (which should not be surprising to you if you read this blog often!)

The comments are already coming in complaining about pairing. I noticed these two particularly:

the obvious conclusion to this is double the hours per project, at minimum (and I'd expect that you would work slower if you had to discuss or explain stuff to someone else the whole day).

I would freak out if someone would watch me every the time I code (and also has a keyboard to interupt me lol)

Sort of the standard responses to pair programming. I'm not so experienced at the art that I can really say the hours don't double, maybe they do - but what I can say is even if the hours are doubling, the code quality is squared. Maybe it's just a commentary on what lousy code I produce by myself, but there is a big difference when someone else is there looking at the code, even if it's only the "navigator" effect, where the person who isn't actually at the keyboard can allocate the memory space to go back and remember any refactorings or other cleanup that needs to be done. As far as working slower, there are only two possibilities: first, that the other person doesn't know about the code as well as you do, in which case the knowledge transfer makes the whole thing worthwhile, or second, that there are a few ways of doing things and you need to decide which way is best. The selection you make when coding by yourself might easily not be that one.

even if the hours are doubling, the code quality is squared.

Freak out if someone watched you code? Dude, is your code really that bad?

Insofar as code reviews go, I find them almost unnecessary when pairing. Some teams do peer-review-before-checkin, which I don't really care for - I just can't grok the concept the code is trying to get across just from staring at it for a few seconds while someone explains it to me, but I suppose some people can do that. But we do code reviews for two things: first, to go over legacy code - we have plenty of that in our application - and second, to go over code that's just been checked in. This isn't 100% useful either, but on the other hand we have very few development meetings, and sometimes it's worth it just so someone can point out, "Oh, this should have been done using this brand new language feature" or, "we have a custom library that already handles exactly this case, can we use it here?"

So code reviews can be worthwhile, and they are absolutely necessary in a non-pairing environment. The big thing to watch out for is that you don't spend a lot of time discussing what your internal coding standards are, as I've written about before. But my feeling is that it is not as useful as pair programming.

iFrame scroll to anchor problem

So on my basketball fan page, HoosierBall, I was working on the schedule display. I had originally set up a simple widget from Zvents, but after using that for two years Zvents apparently changed their entire business model, from events created by users to events created by businesses. Every Hoosier game had already been entered via StubHub, the widget that I had been using no longer worked at all, and as far as I could tell there was no replacement.

But it's not like the schedule display needs to be real complicated. I tossed it into an iFrame, stuck the schedule on a separate page, and wrote some simple Javascript to scroll to a specific game's anchor based on the current date.

But what's this? When the iFrame scrolls, the entire page jumps down to the iFrame to display it. That's not what I wanted, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out a way to stop it from happening, until I finally ran across Jim Epler's blog entry explaining how he simply scrolled the main page back to the top after setting the anchor. So you set the location in the iFrame, the main page jumps down, then you set it back to the top. It's not pretty, but it works. Here's the code in the iFrame:


location.replace(location.href+anchorname);
parent.window.scrollTo(0,0);


Thanks, Jim!

Some test code smells

More of my writeup on the XUnit session I went to nearly two months ago. I hope someday to make all of my note-taking blog entries coherent to a larger audience :)

There are a couple of competing dynamics you get when writing tests: the first is that, in general, less code is better than more code. You want the code to express the concepts you need to express without any extra cruft, without huge globs of copy/pasted code here, there, and everywhere that is a nightmare to maintain. But you need tests as well, and tests are either more code, or more people, and people are one heck of a lot more expensive than code. So it's not at all unlikely that you would have as much test code as production code.

But those tests have to be maintained, so it behooves us to figure out the best way to do that, bearing in mind that the goals of test code are not the same as those of production code. So, here are some problems, or code smells, specific to test code that you might run into:

1. Conditional test logic . A lot of people like to say that one assertion per test is plenty. It seems like unreasonable test gold-plating to me, but if you're going so far as to put an if statement in the middle of the test, you need to have multiple tests to test each branch of the statement, each time. Or, the condition might simply be an assertion, where you're saying if (x) keep testing; else assert false. No point in that, just assert x at the beginning and let the code blow up if it needs to. This really helps with the readability of the test report, too, expecially if all the report says at the end is "The assertion FALSE occurred". Not helpful, whereas knowing directly from the report that X failed is much more useful.


2. Hardcoded test data

This problem is related to the principle that computer science profs have been tossing around since the beginning of time: that you never want to put numbers or strings in code; always define them somewhere as constants instead, so they can be easily changed. Not a bad principle; certainly it's ideal that anything that needs to be displayed to the user can be easily modified to use another language, so you don't want a bunch of MessageBox.Show( "Are you sure you want to do this?" ) statements scattered through the code. For numbers, though, my general rule is that it doesn't need to be a constant value unless it shows up more than once.

But in a sense, just about every number shows up more than once if written properly: at least once in the code, and at least once in the test for that code. Say for example you're testing a Price object with this line of code:

Assert.Equal( $14, CreatePrice().Retail );

CreatePrice() is part of your fixture, and it sets the list price to $20. Your Price object knocks off 30% to come up with the Retail number.

But now you've got the same number in there twice! See it? $14 is in there, and so is 70% of $20. The same number.

One fix is to move everything to constants. Presumably the Price object has a GetDiscount() method, so you could make the $20 into a constant ListPriceInDollars, and change the expected amount to ListPriceInDollars * GetDiscount. Still pretty verbose, but not really bad for this small example. A better solution can be to create an ExpectedObject to compare what comes back from CreatePrice to. In the ideal case, your test would then simplify to

Assert.Equal( ExpectedPrice, CreatePrice() );

Which would cover a boatload of other comparisons as well as your Retail value.

Request could not be submitted for background processing

Boy, don't you hate it when the request could not be submitted for background processing? I know I do.

This is a rather inexplicable error message that Crystal Reports pops up. If you search for the message, you see a few ideas for solutions, but what I eventually did didn't seem to be on anyone's list, so I'm adding this post to the search in case it's helpful.

In my case, the big clue was that we had just modified the report viewer so it could pick up data from alternate data sources based on information in the web.config. It's a pull report, so the data source is specified directly in the report and we're modifying it programatically. My assumption was that somewhere in the report, there was something being specified to use a different data source than all the rest of the report, and that our code that changed the source was missing it. But I couldn't find it, and Crystal report files have a binary format, so they're next to impossible to search through.

The big clue was that we had just modified the report viewer so it could pick up data from alternate data sources

I dug through a book on Crystal last night - luckily it had a chapter on dynamic data sources; thank you Brian Bischof - and one of the things it suggested was to check the connections on the tables using a member function, TestConnectivity. (You can outfit each individual table that a Crystal Report draws upon with its own login information.) To create a dynamic data source, you have to make sure that the source is changed all over the place in the report. In the report object, in any subreports that it uses, in any tables. So I set up the table login information to set it the way it was supposed to be, and then call TestConnectivity, and if that failed, throw an exception. My idea was that there was a single table somewhere causing all the problems, and that if I could figure out which one it was, I could fix it.

Only I didn't need to.

As soon as I added the TestConnectivity check, the report started coming up.

My working assumption is that the changes to the table login information are cached somewhere, and don't actually take hold until the report thinks it's necessary. Presumably there's a bug in the caching system, but calling TestConnectivity causes the table login information to be set properly.

Nice weird one there. Spent too many hours on it though.

Michael Gartenberg - Still Not Twittering

Michael Gartenberg is still not twittering, poor unenlightened soul. He prefers to use Facebook for his minute-to-minute status, and doesn't want to add another bunch of contacts to another social network after having done it twice with Facebook and LinkedIn. Sure can't blame him for that. To mix a metaphor, the walled gardens need to start playing a little more nicely with each other. I think then we'll all be a little more inclined to add a new network to our lists. I got a Jaiku account after the Google news, but I haven't put forth the effort to put a bunch of my contacts on it, or to find a nice client for it, and because of that I haven't even looked at the web page in days.

Michael also points out that it's another feed to check. He's already got a bunch of RSS feeds, work email, and personal email, and doesn't want another feed to look at.

But he is willing to admit that he might be missing things. The issue of how to prioritize feeds is coming up for me, too. The feeds in my information stream generally break down to:

• General status updates and tweets


• Quick-skim blog entries, newspaper articles, longer forum discussion posts


• Technical papers, long blog entries, that you can't really get the gist of by skimming


• General or group emails


• Emails specifically to me, or that I need to deal with


• Tweets specifically to me

(Picture by Pete Reed)

How these are prioritized, and how they should be prioritized, are two different beasts. Certainly my top priority items are emails and tweets for me - they're the things I want to read first. After that, depending on how much time I have, I may want to skim the short items or buckle down to a technical paper. But how I actually prioritize them is via the application they're sitting on. I have a Twitter reader, Outlook, Gmail, and Google Reader to grab all these different feeds: stuff that comes in via Outlook gets highest priority since it has the nicest toast mechanism. Teletwitter, my twitter reader, doesn't always pop toast properly, so I'll often miss messages on it, although I don't care so much since they're low priority. Except, of course, for the ones targeted to me, which are high priority, but which I still miss since there's no way to grab them out of the twitter stream. And if a good technical paper comes across Google Reader, I'll probably share or star it to come back to as I J-J-J through the list, then forget about it entirely.

So there's clearly work to be done in this space.

I am absolutely sure that all my streams can be prioritized together properly, because it seems to me that it can be mechanized without too much trouble, but I'm not sure how yet. But I'm sure someone out there is already working on the issue.

Bloomington Geek Dinner

I copied the link up there from the Facebook event page...I have no idea what it will tell you if you're not a member, or even if the link is good for anyone besides me! Anyway, we're hosting a Bloomington Geek Dinner next Tuesday. Geek dinners got to be popular in the last few years, probably due to Scoble's encouragement, and for a while geekdinner.com was up for people to schedule their events and create guest lists. No more, but Facebook is good for scheduling parties, perhaps too good judging from some IU undergrads, and there are a lot of Facebook groups as well as open Web pages for local geeks to find each other, meet, eat, and talk tech; for the big cities there are even specialized girl geek dinners.

But none for Bloomington, until now. Or even Indianapolis, as far as I know; if you're up in Indy feel free to come down - we'd love to have you.

It'll be at Max's Place downtown, starting around 7PM. See you there!


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Indy Tech Fest

Big room has no wifi; smaller room seems to work pretty well. I feel very blind without a net connection. Have I said that before? :)

Session #1:
Stephen Fulcher, VS 2008
3.0 install only has WCF and WPF, everything else is the same as 2.0
Integration is tight to SQL Server. Other db's?
anonymous variables - new keyword var (not untyped, but takes on the type of the right-hand side)
lambda funcs,
extension methods: public bool IsBool( this string s )
Generate code metrics?
Q: Is var a breaking change? A: no, you can still use it is the name of a variable

XAML
Services (not web services, just services)
ServiceContract, OperationContract, DataContract attributes. - all specified as an interface
svcutil.exe generates client code and can resolve from existing DLL's
----

Session 2:
Mark Strawmeyer
C# tips & tricks
ctrl-alt-downarrow window list
ctrl-/ takes you to search menu
In the search window, type a ">" to go to a list of immediate-style commands
F12 is "go to definition"
Shift-F12 "Find all References", then use F8 to cycle through them
Code snippets - intellisense to generate code - type in the code and tab (to autocomplete), tab (to generate)
very powerful! prop, for, tryf
"Organize using" tools in VS2008
Unit testing support:
Test input from data source
unit test assemblies without source
Now part of VS2008 Pro
"Create Unit Test" option
Code Profiling is not part of Pro

---- Break for lunch. There are some lunchtime sessions but we just hung out in the lobby and watched the XBoxers.

Session 3:
Mark Strawmeyer
Ajax Tips
eh. Mostly just an overview of Ajax.net

Session 4:

Silverlight

Chad Campbell

Silverlight is the new name for WPF/E. Create a silverlight object using xaml. Add "Silverlight.CreateObjectEx()" to the HTML to use the plugin.
You can use .Net with silverlight 1.1. Silverlight is a browser-based plugin. It's cross-browser, cross-platform. What does that mean? They've written a plugin for Firefox as well as IE? Supports Mac and Linux and Safari as well. .Net framework used by Silverlight is specific to Silverlight.

Access the HTML DOM from managed code. Silverlight plugin will not be able to access the local file system.

Session 5

Dave Bost

WPF applications

Starts by demoing a Twitter feed on his page, created with Silverlight

Is it going to be the same presentation he did in Indy about a year ago? I don't think I blogged about that.

WF, WPF, WCF, Cardspace. WPF is .Net layer over DirectX.

Nice demo of an airport simulation

Expression is a set of tools for designers. Expression Web, Blend, Design, Media. Costs a bundle, though. Once you design the xaml, you can edit it in Visual Studio.

http://devcares.com in Indy every month.

Continuous Integration

The time between a defect being entered and being found is related to the expense of fixing it

Graphing the number of tests over time would seem to be a good idea

Sligo dashboard: classes, LOC, duplication, max complexity, tests run, line coverage, branch coverage, FindBugs violations; PMD Violations; Max Afferent; Max Efferent

Code reviews are good for high level details; use machines to do the low level detail finding

Code complexity tools: CCMEtrics, Vil

Code duplication detector: Simian

Dependency: NDepend

Coding Standards: FXCop

How to work with an open source team

"Free as in Freedom"
"Free as in Beer"

http://opensource.org/

Q: Don't people resent when companies take open source projects and make money off of them? A: More power to them! Many companies are using their employees to do open source. It's good PR for a company to have people who work on open source - give back to the community, attract high-power talent

Don't contribute unless you:
Know the project license
Get permission from your employer
Get legal review if needed
Can communicate clearly in the project language (usually English)

Oracle tried to strongarm Linux, got squashed, came back with offers to help. Good PR! (I'm not familiar with this story!)

Project currency is trust and respect. You don't start with any. Remember, if you're good, you don't have to point it out.

Q: How do you start gaining respect? A: Post to the mailing list, point out bugs AND fixes. Maybe someone will request a patch, provide it

Q: How does the code stay consistent and looking good? A: There are tools, or people who do work to make things consistent. Or, it doesn't :)

Q: How do you get non-coding contributions going (docs, images)? How do non-coders get cred? A: Projects should support people like tech writers, if they're good.

How to Gather Customer Feedback

Don't aggravate customers with annoying surveys!
Make sure to ask "Is there anything else?"

Several stories about bad feedback forms

Interviewing 5-10 customers is probably as good as interviewing hundreds

Don't assume that no complaints = customer satisfaction. They may just be putting up with it, especially if they feel no one is listening.

Don't just do surveys. Use different feedback-gathering methods. Invite open-ended feedback, in surveys or otherwise.

Don't ignore the feedback!

Focus on the service attributes most important to your clients. Don't know what's important to them? Better find out!

"What aspect of our service is most important to you? Regarding it, how are we doing?"

Lots and lots of examples of how not to

FBWA (Feedback By Walking Around)

I love how Microsoft gets all Ajaxy with feedback on every page: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229931.aspx

Again, act on the feedback! Summary of responses, detailed responses, action

Don't forget power of the naked eye. Often problems are obvious and don't need surveys

Security code reviews

Foundstone Security Frame
Hacme Casino http://www.foundstone.com/us/resources/whitepapers/hacmecasino_userguide.pdf
Foundstone CodeScout

Paros (web app security assessment) http://www.parosproxy.org/index.shtml

Don't overanalyze. (Spending two hours determining if a strcpy is vulnerable. Takes two minutes to change)

Identify code review objectives (Insider backdoors, compliance with specific regulations)

Lots of discussion of tools. I think the point is, use available analysis tools before bothering with a code review - it's easier and cheaper

http://www.securecoding.org/list

http://codesecurely.org

Usability by Inspection

Doing code reviews? That's good! Code reviews are a big help. They ensure uniformity of code, teach people new design patterns, and often even help to avoid bugs.

Doing usability reviews?

Me either. But if you've got a product that has a UI, an easy thing to do to improve the product is to just sit down with a few people, maybe some that will actually use the product, maybe some managers, or maybe just some people that you can pull in to see what they think. That's more or less the gist of what I got from Larry Constantine's session on Usability Reviews.


Now, the first thing to realize is that a "usability review" is different than a "grouse session". I was once doing a demo for an internal tool my team was working on, and after I'd showed how the tool worked, during the Q&A period one guy spoke up to say, "Boy, does that interface ever look like it was designed by a programmer."

"Interesting," I said. "How would you improve it?"

"Oh, you know. It just doesn't look as sharp as it could."

Well, yes. Nothing ever does; but it wasn't too helpful to tell me that. So, when you do a review, you have to be specific.

But how can you be specific about a UI? A UI is just a UI, right? It either looks good or it doesn't.

Not at all! There are lots of basic principles of design that the people who make web sites for a living know about. Even if your organization really is full of web pages designed by programmers, there's no harm in teaching the programmers some basic principles of design. I have a couple of books on that subject, one by Mr. Constantine himself, which I didn't even realize until I'd gone in to the session. But the organization or team should probably lay down the fundamental precepts of design that they want to follow. The usability defects will be easier to objectively identify with that list in mind. Some examples of good design principles are: Availability, Feedback, Structure, Reuse, Tolerance, Simplicity. Check one of the books for some guides as to the specifics, but a usability defect violates one of these principles, or you could also say it is a probable cause of user delay and confusion. But it's not a usability defect if you just don't think it looks good!

So here's how you prepare for a usability review: First, organize a few use cases. You may already have them as part of your project, or you may just have to make some up. What you'll be doing is telling the users what they're trying to accomplish.

Then, get the folks together. At a minimum, you should probably have:

• A leader, to make sure everything moves along smoothly;
• A notetaker;
• A Continuity Reviewer. This is someone who is reviewing the UI specifically to make sure it is consistent with overall project guidelines, and with the other pages in the project.
• Users - people who will attempt to use the page. They can be actual customers; agile-style customers; or just people who were walking down the hall at the wrong time.
• A Designated Driver. This is someone who will perform actual mouse clicks or typing at the request of the users. This will depend on the exact situation - do you have a real application, or just some mockups? Do you have a big meeting room and a lot of users, or not? If not, the Designated Driver might as well just be the user.
• Developers/Designers. Developers and designers who worked on the page must never explain or defend design, argue with users, or promise anything. They may only find problems. Users do not count as problems.

It's an important point for reviewing anything that if a reviewer doesn't find problems, he's not doing his job. I always have to remind myself of that. But the people who worked on the application; the programmers, the designers, the developers; they will always be able to give a reason for why it works the way it does. Don't listen! Mr. Constantine suggested a "virtual air horn" - you get to pretend to be a big truck and blow the horn to get people out of the way. You must blow the virtual air horn whenever excuses, explanations, or rationalizations are made.
Next, have the users go through the use case or scenario you've designed. Introduce the scenario with an overview of context and user motivation. Read one step of the scenario at a time, and ask the users what they would do next. Users take lead in proposing actions. Never guide or prompt users! Help is limited to simple description or clarification. If the user has to ask for help, you've automatically got a usability defect.
For each defect that you find, the notetaker should note:

1. The feature or function that the defect is in;
2. The location; which web page it is or a screenshot of the GUI
3. Which design principle is being violated
4. A short description of the problem
5. The estimated severity of the problem. (nominal, minor, major, critical )

Ideally, these would be on a form the notetaker would be able to fill out.
You should probably allow one to three hours for the review. So that's it! Get out there and say goodbye to applications that look like they were designed by programmers!

Web Application Risk Modeling

"Reverse" model - take the business case of the system and work down to threats.

A threat is not a vulnerability. A threat is what someone might try to do to your system; a vulnerability is how they would do it successfully

What risk drivers are there?

Application overview: Documentation drill; models; dataflow
Decompose application: break it down into well-defined "chunks".

Identify threats against the security objectives

Identify vulnerabilities "Vulnerability Assessments"

A threat model helps you to define, categorize, and prioritize vulnerabilities

Make sure to fix vulnerabilities, not exploits - understand all nuances, attack potential, exploit paths

STRIDE / DREAD

Other factors:
Ease of use, mitigants, timing, visibility,
monitorability (can you watch people doing stuff?),
forensics,
access required( even for internal apps, what are the chances of a bad guy infiltrating? )

XSS: Take user-inputted data and display it back without filtering. Nuances to XSS (Reflective Script Attack, Persistent Private Vectors)
POST based attack would not show up in server logs

xUnit Test Patterns and Smells

This comes from a really good session by Gerard Meszaros on Test Patterns at SD Best Practices 2007.

Here's my history on test-driven develoment: Back in the nineties, I first read Martin Fowler's Refactoring. I thought it was a good idea, and attempted several refactorings on the code base I was working on, with good success. I think it was one of the better-coded applications to come out of that company. But I was always annoyed, because the instructions for the refactoring would always say something like, make your changes, and test. Testing is hard, man! Especially when you're testing a bit of the application that takes two minutes to get to from application launch and relying on a Direct3D driver to do the right thing.

So I added refactoring to my arsenal but didn't think too much more about it, until about five years ago, when I ran across an article on TDD in, I think, Dr. Dobbs, but it may not have been. The article mentioned some ideas about testing and mock objects, which turned out to be exactly what I needed for the project I was working on then, which was a business-level client API with a wrapper lib for calls to the server - the ideal thing for a mock. I played with it for a while, and it worked beautifully! Pretty soon I presented a proposal for moving to TDD to the team I was working with.

There were a couple of quotes that I put in my presentation (probably from the magazine article) that I really liked:

• Tests must be easy to run. If they aren't, people won't run them.
• Tests must be easy to write. If they aren't, people won't write them.

This session was all about the second quote.

The problem is, tests are easy to skip. Comment out. Ignore. If you do that, your code isn't being tested. But the client doesn't care about that...at least in the beginning. Later on, if your code isn't being tested, bugs will start to crop up. You'll make a change in one area that you never in a million years thought would affect this bit of code over there. But it does, and you've introduced a bug. The client will sure care about that! So you really have to put the effort in to write tests.

But at the same time, you're selling the production code, not the tests. If your team is spending more time on the tests than on the code itself, your velocity is sure to suffer.

So what's the solution? Go back and look at the second quote again. Tests must be easy to write. How do we make them that way?

The first thing to notice is that your objectives for test code are probably going to be a little different than for the production code. For example, execution speed is crucial for production code. You can't have your users twiddling their thumbs while they wait for your web page to load. But for test code, not so much. Go ahead and add ten seconds worth of tests to your build; think anyone will notice? Or, add four hours worth of tests. Sounds good! Just make sure to run them overnight when no one needs to watch them.

On the other hand, is simplicity important for production code? Well...it can't hurt, of course. The smaller and cleaner you can get the code, the better. But sometimes there's nothing you can do about it; you have to add that cache for speed; or denormalize the database so you don't have to make calls across a dozen tables. But for test code? Let's say it again: Tests must be easy to write.

What else? Is correctness important for production code? Of course...but users will put up with small bugs. But correct test code is an absolute requirement. If you don't have the tests right, you'll be writing incorrect production code to satisfy the bad tests. What about flexibility? Code should be flexible, right? Not really, not test code. In fact, there will probably be enough hard-coded test values to make it hardly flexible at all.

This is getting long. I'll add more later.

Software in the large

Here are my initial notes on the Jutta Eckstein presentation on scaling agile development across large teams. Cleanup may follow :)

Scrum of Scrums
Crystal

Iteration Duration: larger the team, shorter the development cycle
per week, count on a half day of retrospective (two week cycle = 1 full day retrospective)

Expectation: plan/develop/deliver.
Difficult - activity-oriented planning or component-oriented planning?
Therefore: Result-oriented planning. Focus on the features! Comes back to the Agile Manifesto: Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer.

Plan for accomplishing a valuable feature: integration, test, documentation.
A feature is a brief statement of functionality, from the user's perspective
How does one deal with architecture issues?
A feature produces a measurable result.

Iterations are steered by features, but defined by tasks

Tracking tools: PPTS, TRAC
Someone also mentions they use Sharepoint
Or just three checkboxes: working on it, untested, done done
Tools support communication, not replace it

Release Planning

Iteration review (Demo)
Present software, recognize & extract best practices, learn from failure

Measurement: Acceptance tests, planned functionality, is the product owner satisfied?

Retrospective after every iteration. Likely problem that people try to make large-scale changes

- Cross-functional or feature teams
- A large project might have tech teams; the customer of a tech team is a feature team

An ideal team is self-organized; this ensures whole features and good knowledge sharing. Managers must provide environment allowing teams to gel. This is like my ACG posts from a few months ago.

Trust

Agile development is a trouble detector. Bad news is also good news. Integration of departments (Projects are customers) Close customer relationship ensures rapid feedback.

Discussion of implementing practices a few at a time. Ping-pong implementation!

Synchronization: Face-to-face is preferred. Sync across subteams daily (Scrum of scrums). If your team is self-organizing how does that work?

Communication via wiki

Just one "Chief architect" - pulls the strings, makes technical decisions, "guiding light". Relationship of chief architect and customer?

Starting: take baby steps. Start small. Use skilled people. Develop a few features and make sure to do iteration retrospectives. Grow slowly.

Don't finalize architecture before growing team; use retrospectives. Domain teams must formulate new requirements. (But you might have to finalize to eliminate fear...or at least say it's finalized!).

Avoid hot technology. A large project has enough problems on its own without trying to train developers on something new at the same time.

Refactoring: technical excellence is doubly important. If a developer sees a needed refactoring on another team, they have to point it out to them.

Large projects may have exponentially greater test time. 10% of dev effort for integration/build. (If something is difficult, do it over and over until it's not difficult any more.)
Q: Special iterations for integration? A: no
Nor a special integration team; rather people from each team who specialize in integrating

Reviews:
Special review team. People should jump around between teams, and be on a team strictly for the purpose of reviewing the code. Everyone should do this.

Knowledge transfer (via Daily Scrum and pair programming). Scrum master ensures the process; product owner ensures business value).

Q: Agility in a distributed environment. A:

Could not load type 'Global'

The comments on Harish's blog entry from two years ago give a lot of different solutions to the 'Could not load type "Global" ' problem that you sometimes get in ASP.Net. My solution to the issue was an interesting twist on one of those answers.

I had recently upgraded an application from ASP.Net 1.1 to ASP.NET 2.0, but to keep supporting old versions of the application, I branched it off in Subversion. To make sure the old version still worked, I checked out the old code into a new folder, then I went into IIS and simply moved the location of some virtual directories to point to the old code. It all worked and forgot about it.

Until later, when I came back to make some changes to the new application, started it up and got the message:

Parser Error Message: Could not load type 'WebApplication1.Global'.Source Error: Line 1: <%@ Application Codebehind="Global.asax.cs" Inherits="'WebApplication1.Global'" %>

I couldn't make heads or tails of it, but a web search led me to Harish's post and lots of different answers, several of which I tried, but none of which worked. One suggestion was to make sure the application was set in IIS to use ASP.Net 2.0 rather than 1.1, and even to set it to 1.1, click Apply, set it to 2.0 again and click Apply, just to make sure it took. Another was to make sure the application was compiled. If there's no assembly built for the application, it won't load.
I checked the ASP version, and it was indeed set to 2.0; I said, "Duh!" to compiling, but made sure there was an assembly in the bin directory, and there was; so I was at a dead end.

But I'm sure by now you see where this is going. As I opened up IIS to check the ASP.Net version configuration again, I happened to glance down at the local path for the virtual directory on that tab. And what did I see? The directory was still pointing at the path to the branched directory; a perfectly legal application, but one that was built using ASP.Net 1.1, and also had been cleaned sometime in the not-too-distant past. So the version I had configured in IIS was neither compiled, nor a 2.0 application! No wonder the error came up.

So I have an additional solution for this problem. Check your virtual directory location and make sure it's pointing to the application you're expecting it to be.

Pair Programming with VNC

Dietrich Kappe writes on the Agile Ajax blog on surmounting the difficulties of pair programming when part of your team is offshore. Interesting stuff, but Dietrich, you also made the offhand comment that Test Driven Development is one of your commandments as well. What's your process for writing Ajax unit tests, and if you're not always doing continuous integration, how do you know your tests are always passing? I'd be curious to know!