James Newkirk's Blog

Lessons Learned in Programmer Testing

jamesnewkirk — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 02:36:34 GMT

I just posted a the presentation and sample code from the Lessons Learned in Programmer Testing sessions that I did at a few conferences this summer. Click here for the details.

ExpectedException considered harmful!

jamesnewkirk — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 20:10:00 GMT

I have written a blog post detailing the issues that I have with ExpectedException. Also, I am not just complaining, I have ported in a sense the Assert.Throws method that Brad and I wrote for xUnit.net to make it work in NUnit and the testing tool in Visual Studio Team System. You can read about it here.

xUnit.net v1.0 Released

jamesnewkirk — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 01:14:00 GMT

We released xUnit.net 1.0 today! Download, blog post.

xUnit.net v1.0(RC2) Released

jamesnewkirk — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 23:27:00 GMT

Brad Wilson and I released xUnit.net v1.0(RC2) today. Brad has the details on his blog.

You can download the release on CodePlex here.

The CodePlex Team and the patterns & practices Summit

jamesnewkirk — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 23:56:00 GMT

The CodePlex team will be well represented again at the patterns & practices Summit in Redmond, WA - November 5-9, 2007 . We will be presenting or co-presenting the following sessions:

"Yet Another Talk on Agility" - Brad Wilson and Peter Provost
Dependency Injection Frameworks - Brad Wilson and Scott Densmore
EntLib Devolved - Scott Densmore
Make It Your Own - Scott Densmore
Lessons Learned in Programmer Testing - Jim Newkirk
CodePlex is sponsoring an evening event on Tuesday titled "Open Source in the Enterprise".

Peter's not on the CodePlex team but we like him just the same. For additonal information on the summit and all of the sessions please click here.

Announcing xUnit.net

jamesnewkirk — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 22:10:00 GMT

I have just blogged about a new testing framework that Brad Wilson and I have developed. Click here for details.

Why you should not use Setup and Teardown in NUnit

jamesnewkirk — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 22:48:00 GMT

I just posted my thoughts about Setup and Teardown at my new blog home. Click here.

NUnit Converter V1.1 - Moved from GotDotNet

jamesnewkirk — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 00:30:00 GMT

Due to the shutdown of GotDotNet I have moved the NUnit Converter V1.1 to here. Note: This is not a new version. If you have comments or questions please let me know.

xUnit Test Patterns and Better Software Development for Agile Teams

jamesnewkirk — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 23:30:00 GMT

These two books were recently published by Addison-Wesley. For a blog post on each book see the following on my new blog:

xUnit Test Patterns by Gerard Meszaros
Better Software Development for Agile Teams by Will Stott and James Newkirk

If you have any questions please let me know. Will and I look forward to your feedback on our book.

Test-Driven Development in Microsoft .NET Supplemental Material

jamesnewkirk — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 15:47:00 GMT

Due to the closing of GotDotNet I have moved the supplemental material (sample chapter and source code) to here. If you have any questions please let me know.

Moving Day

jamesnewkirk — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 15:44:00 GMT

I have decided for a number of reasons to move my blog to a new address. The new address is http://jamesnewkirk.typepad.com. For a few posts I will be cross-posting but about a month from now I will be at the new address exclusively. Please join me at my new blog home.

TechEd 2007

jamesnewkirk — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 00:04:42 GMT

I will be at TechEd next week. I am helping out my co-author Will Stott at a Chalk-Talk Session on Monday, June 4 at 4:45p. The session is titled, "Microsoft Visual Studio Team System for Agile Teams".

In addition to this I will be at the "Open Source Software in Enterprise Development" panel discussion at lunch time on Thursday.

I will also be at one of the Microsoft booths at various times (I'll post more details on Sunday). If you questions/comments/complaints about CodePlex please drop by and let me know.

Teamprise and CodePlex

jamesnewkirk — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 03:09:00 GMT

When we launched CodePlex last June we thought there might be an issue with some projects that had contributors who did not work on Windows. This was confirmed when we heard feedback loud and clear saying I cannot put my project on CodePlex because the only client that you have for Source Control is Team Explorer.

Well that was certainly true until today... Earlier today Teamprise announced a complimentary license of the Teamprise client suite for anyone wanting to connect to an open source project on CodePlex. I can't thank Martin Woodward enough and the rest of the team at Teamprise for offering their great tool to our customers. This opens up CodePlex to a larger number of potential projects who in the past may have considered other open source hosting solutions.

If you are CodePlex contributor click here to sign up to receive the complimentary license.

How to make sense of Code Coverage metrics

jamesnewkirk — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 23:14:00 GMT

(co-authored with Brad Wilson)

Even since the release of Visual Studio Team System 2005 with easy to use code coverage tools, people inside (and outside) of Microsoft have been talking about what it means. The most common approach we've seen is for a team leader to mandate a minimum code coverage number (like "all code must have at least 80% code coverage before being checked in"). As agile advocates, you'd expect that our team's TDD'd code would have 100% code coverage. And you'd be wrong.

We could all agree that test-covered code is better than not, so we probably also agree that a high coverage number is better than a low one. Why can't we come up with a hard and fast number that means "good"? The answer is that it's different for every project, and even for a single project, that number may change over time. It is inevitable that code is written which isn't covered by a unit test. A few examples of acceptable code without tests might include: web service wrappers generated by Visual Studio, views in a Model-View-Presenter system, and code for which failure is only possible because the underlying platform fails (like helper methods that pass default values into more complex .NET CLR methods).

So when you run that code coverage system for the first time and it pops up "73%", what next? Well, if it's the first time you've run the test, you're probably going to check out that other 27% and see how you categorize it. Does that code need coverage or not? If so, use the lack of code coverage to educate yourself on taking smaller steps in TDD. But if not, what then? Is 73% a magical number?

The answer lies in a metric that can be used to predict the weather, barometric pressure. Today, weather.com says the barometric pressure in Seattle is 29.66”Hg and falling. More important than the absolute measurement is the trend: it tells you that the overcast and drizzling rain outside is going to get worse, not better. The two pieces of information - value and trend - are used to predict what will happen next. The same can be said for code coverage. You can determine the relative health of your tests by using the value and the trend to determine the appropriate action. That’s the important bit: code coverage gives you relative measurements against itself, not an absolute measurement against a target value. If your coverage fell from 73% to 72%, would you be worried? What if it fell from 73% to 67%?

Rather than holding your team to an absolute goal, use the trend to determine when you should invest time to figure out where you're covered and not, and to determine what to do about it.

CodePlex Deployment - February 20, 2007

jamesnewkirk — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 01:33:00 GMT

We deployed a new version of the CodePlex software this past Tuesday. I wanted to give you a break down of the features and issues that we deployed, as well as give you a preview of some changes to the upcoming release pages that we are currently working on for the deployment on March 13th. As I mentioned in my previous blog post voting has had a huge impact on the priority of the items that we work on. For example, the feature "Ability to add a Soapbox video to home page" was created on January 8, 2007. It received a large amount of votes, 45 in fact, and we implemented and deployed it within 5 weeks. We can't promise to turn all of the work items around as quickly but the more you vote the higher the priority. In our next deployment we are working on the release pages. To give you an approximate view of the changes here is the February 20, 2007 CodePlex deployment. Note: The Comments column is something that will not be part of the deployment.

Mock-Up Of New CodePlex Release Pages (to be deployed March 13, 2007)

Total Votes: 220

Work Items

Issues (11 Votes)

Votes	*Name (links to work item on CodePlex)*	Comments
5	Add a More link on quick markup guide
2	spelling error in People tab: "Coodinators"	:) Any more spelling errors and I will be purchasing a dictionary for all team members
1	Unable to show more than 10 items per page
1	Can't delete posts	This was an oversight. I suppose all bugs are but this was truly something we intended to do but somehow did not get put into the previous release.
1	Links to anchors within in a web page don't work (used to work)
0	Special national characters not working in CodePlex	All issues prior to the implementation of voting have a vote count as zero.
0	Export To Excel Maintain Sort Order
1	the forum of CodePlex can not display chinese character

Features (209 Votes)

Votes	*Name (links to work item on CodePlex)*	Comments
48	No way to contact user	We have been wanting to do this for awhile. I hope this helps facilitate more 1 to 1 communication. We did implement it with appropriate safeguards. If you do not want to be contacted you do not have to provide your email.
45	Feature request: Ability to add a Soapbox vid to home page
40	Project Logo	Many people have been asking for customizations of the project home page. This feature allows you to change the graphic and replace the title with your own custom logo.
33	Create profile page for users	This is the beginning of work that we will be doing for individual profiles, keep your suggestions coming.
22	Go to Work Item	Believe it or not we used to have this feature. You might ask why it was removed. I removed it as a requirement when we built the new Advanced View. Its back and I probably won't take it out again.
12	The issues I have submited
6	Need to be able to bulk edit work items on codeplex	We did this explicitly on the page and it also works with right-click behavior.
3	I should be able to search for the bug reported by me	This is a duplicate of work item #3096
0	I want to multi language support on Wiki...