… Not The Destination

This post first started as I was discussing my post “You Aren’t Doing Scrum If …” with a friend who had read the post and was worried that I might not fit in an organization that wasn’t doing all of Scrum.  I’ve since had other conversations and as I’ve reflected on the topic, I still stand by my original post, because there are some fundamental properties of Scrum that you have to implement in order to follow that methodology.  This is why I called the post “You Aren’t Doing Scrum If …” and not “You Aren’t Doing Agile If …”

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I’ve had two incidents recently that have shown me how TDD impacts Software Architecture.  Both of these are with code I’m working on.

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I read a post this week that was essentially a rant on the way JavaScript handles concatenation.  It states that JavaScript is in someway “broken” (without actually using that word) because JavaScript does not work the way this person expected it to.

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My experience with setting up Selenium Grid was frustrated by the lack of information available about exactly what I needed to do to get this working.

I’ve actually had this working for a while now and I’ve set it up, or helped others set it up now, several times.  So, I guess it is time to write a post about it so I can just send people here when I need to explain the setup.

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A while ago I wrote an article explaining what SpecFlow is, and why you might want to use it.  I’ve been using it for several months now and I’ve recognized several patterns that have emerged in my usage that I wish I had known when I started, so I thought I’d share them with you today.

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Several weeks ago, I started the process of converting this blog to a responsive design.  At this point it is mostly done.  But it is done enough that I can tell you the process that I went through to get the site converted. I was surprised by how easy the process was.  But I guess I was lucky because the theme I started out with already was following a number of best practices. So, to start out with, if you want to move your site toward responsive web design, there are some prerequisites that you’ll need to pay attention to.

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This past week a very old (last time I did work for him was in 2007) client of mine contacted me because their program suddenly started exhibiting a problem.  It seems that if a user enters a date anytime in 2015, the program displays an error message indicating that they need to enter a date greater than today and less than two years from today.

When I went to replicate the error in my debugger, I discovered this bit of code:

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if (Year < 100)
{
    if (Year < 15)
    {
        Year += 2000;
    }
    else
    {
        Year += 1900;
    }
}

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A couple of weeks ago, we discussed Value types and Reference types where we said that a reference type points to the value it represents and a value type is the value it represents. This has implications when we work with the assignment operator because when you assign a reference type and change the content of what it is pointing to, both variables get changed because they are both pointing to the same location in memory.  If you do this with a value type, only the one you change sees the change because you are working with a copy.

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Many people starting out with Unit testing get stuck when it comes to using their tools with the Visual Studio environment.  If it isn’t built in, how do we make it work with Visual Studio?  In this article I want to explore the basics of creating a unit test for NUnit and getting it running from Visual Studio.

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It is amazing to me how few programmers understand the fundamentals of how variables work.  Not just in .NET or C# specifically, but in every language they work in.  It amazes me for two reasons.  First, I don’t think I could program if I didn’t understand what was physically happening as a result of the code I was writing.  Not knowing how the variables relate to the memory that they use would be, to me, a major limitation.  But it also amazes me because I don’t think anyone can program intelligently until they do know what is happening. So, I’ll start from the outside and move in to what’s happening in memory.

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