Chennai Agile User Group December Meetup.

I went to Chennai Agile User Group December meet up on Saturday (1-Dec-2007) . Myself, Siddh, Sury Balasubramanian and Balaji met in Gaea Global at about 3 PM and we were discussing till 5 Pm.

We started our discussion with “How to make people talk” in meetings. Making someone to talk is really difficult. I face this daily in my work. For people who dont understand the value of Agile meetings, its always a pain. Sury was mentioning an example on how people talk about Standups or Scrum Meetings ( with sad face, they used to say ” I have to attend a stand up meeting @ hh:mm … ” as if it were a punishment ). Motivating the developers who are sloppy and convincing them that certain processes ; like daily stand ups, unit testing etc; are essential is a big challenge in Agile Adoption. There may be ways to get around this. For example slide 6 in this ppt talks about “How can a process be founded on people and promote self-motivation & self-organisation“.

Siddh explained us about Mock objects. He walked through a demo on Mock objects starting with a simple situation and moving to more complex situations. It was an interesting discussion.

We also discussed how to publicize Chennai Agile User Group. This time around we discussed about the venue, how to bring more people to the meeting etc. We discussed about running a newsletter, asking people to contribute etc.

I have not completed reading A Practical Guide to Feature-Driven Development which Siddh shared in last meeting. I have borrowed it again. I will complete reading before our net meeting on 12-Jan-2008 at 3 PM at Gaea Global

Chennai Agile User Group November Meetup.

I went to Chennai Agile User Group November meet up on Saturday. Myself, Siddh and Sury Balasubramanian (yes, only we three turned up) met in Gaea Global at about 3 PM and we were discussing till 5 Pm.

First I would like to thank Sury for providing space and Siddh for organizing meet. It was a very good and effective meeting. Siddh showed us how to use Selenium for testing web applications. Sury’s company is using Fit for testing in his projects. He showed us how they are doing it. We discussed about continuous integration. Sury is using CruiseControl and Siddh is using a tool called Hudson . We discussed about it.

We also discussed how to publicize Chennai Agile User Group. We thought of doing some hands on in the next session.

Siddh shared his book : A Practical Guide to Feature-Driven Development. I have already read about 5 chapters in it. Its really a good book. I am planning to complete reading this book before our next meet-up.

Our next meet-up will be on Dec 1 2007 at 3 PM at  Gaea Global

Effectively using my Time…

Last week, I read about Time Management and I am currently following this in my work

1. I prepare my Action Items(To Do list) with priorities the previous night. I try to accomplish everything on the list. Initially, I was having too many action items in the list for every day (inexperience). Now a days I see to that I have only important tasks that should be done for the day. If something new comes up, I add it to the list and prioritize.
2. I follow the STING method more often now a days. I am finding it very useful.
3. Starting this week, I decided to spent less (no) time on my personal work during office hours. By personal work, I mean – checking personal email, reading blogs etc. Even I am making a practice of looking at my official emails only 2 /3 times a day. I have disabled all those silly new mail reminders and keep my outlook closed most of the time.
4. I am maintaining a time Journal as suggested by Dr. Randy Pausch..
   From this journal I identified that I was spending time without any specific objectives in my mind. For example, I had an RSS Reader installed on my office computer and have subscribed to quite a lot of RSS feeds. I used to open the reader atleast 2-3 times a day – just to mark all the entries as read Gosh.. I was maintaining the RSS Reader like my Inbox. I didn’t want to see any unread items there. Crazy way to spend my time…. Now , one of my low priority task is to clean up the RSS reader and have it subscribe to only ** selected** feeds. (At one point of time I decided to uninstall it completely. But then, blogs are one of the effective ways to learn; so decided to keep)My time journal is a simple XL file which contains 3 columns – Time (15 mins interval), What I did, Whether its productive Time / Unproductive time. I update this sheet every 30 mins. Try this and its an excellent method
5. We are now doing kind of Pair Programming in office. No, not to the extend specified in XP. But its just a start. My team mate and myself are finding it very useful. We alternate (drive) the key board every 1.5 hours. We start with a specific goal in our mind for each session and continue until the goal (task) is accomplished. Benefits : Effective use of time, no distractions, learn from each other.

STING Method to stop procrastination

Today I followed the STING method to overcome my procrastination.  Using this method, I was able to read a time management book in  5 one hour sessions ( 5 hours of productive time).  I made a decision to read the book for one hour without any distractions or interruptions.  After one hour, I took a break of 10 – 15 mins. I started again to read for another 1 hour.
After reading this book,  I feel highly motivated.  Tomorrow I will be reading an ASP.NET book using the same method.

Time Management…

I am reading about Time Management for sometime now.  A couple of interesting links:

• Matthew Cornell
• Dr. Randy Pausch’s  Time Management Video

I have already started implementing the idea of Time Journal.  The results are showing off on my productivity for the past couple of days. I have to keep this going. I am planning to publish the summary of my time journal every day in this blog.  I would also be implementing some other ideas I learnt from my reading about this subject.  Before I put them here, I want to try it first.  Let me see how it goes.

Wish you a Happy Divapali..

Wish you and your family a very happy Divapali…

Excellent Quote.

Confidence is the result of hours and days and weeks and years of constant work and dedication. – Roger Staubach, American Football Player

Real Programmer..

Today I came across an article about The challenge of teaching yourself a programming language on Reg Braithwaite   blog.  An interesting post.  I searched around the web and found the following articles which are related to this.

• The Tao Of Programming
•  The psychology of learning – perfection-oriented and performance-oriented.
• Real Programmer
• Becoming A Real Programmer (thinking about thinking…)
• The Magic in the Box

Ultimately, my goal in life is to become of A Real Programmer. I  know the  journey is very long, but I am confident that I will get there one day.

NUnit Core Concepts…

I started learning NUnit. Currently I am reading the book Test-Driven Development in Microsoft .NET by James W. Newkirk ,Alexei A. Vorontsov. I have finished reading and working through examples from a couple of chapters . I would recommend this book for who wish to get started in Test Driven Development. I was of the thought that getting started in NUnit would be a difficult task. But the truth is otherwise. Its easy. Here are the some of the basics and core concepts about NUnit to get started

• TestFixture Attribute

This attribute is to specify the class that contains the test case. This attribute is placed before the classes that contain test code.
using System;
using NUnit.Framework;
namespace NUnitCoreConcepts
{
[TestFixture]
public class CoreConcepts()
{
…
}
}

• [TEST] Attribute

The [Test] attribute specifies the Test Methods inside the Test Class. The Test Methods are the methods that contains code for testing.

using System;
using NUnit.Framework;
namespace NUnitCoreConcepts
{
[TestFixture]
public class CoreConcepts
{
[Test]
public void AdditionTest()
{
int num1 = 3;
int num2 = 4;
Assert.AreEqual(7, num1 + num2);
}
}
}

• Assertions

In NUnit, Assertions are the way to determine whether the TestCode in the Test method passed or failed. In the above example Assert.AreEqual() method verifies the actual and expected and says whether the test passed or not. There are many static methods in Assert class. Some of them are
Assert.AreEqual()
Assert.IsTrue()
Assert.IsNull() …

• [Setup] Attribute [TearDown] Attribute

The [Setup] attribute specifies the method that has to be executed before every Test method is executed. It normally contains initialization code.
The [TearDown] attribute specifies the method that has to be executed after the Test method is executed. Its normally contains code to release the resources.
using System;
using NUnit.Framework;
namespace NUnitCoreConcepts
{
[TestFixture]
public class CoreConcepts
{
private int num1 ;
private int num2 ;
[SetUp]
public void Init()
{
num1 = 3;
num2 = 4;
}
[Test]
public void AdditionTest()
{
Assert.AreEqual(7, num1 + num2);
}
}
}

• ExpectedException Attribute

ExpectedException attribtue specifies that executing the test code would raise an exception. See the example below

using System;
using NUnit.Framework;
namespace NUnitCoreConcepts
{
[TestFixture]
public class CoreConcepts
{
[Test]
[ExpectedException(typeof(DivideByZeroException))]
public void DivideByZeroExceptionTest ()
{
int zero = 0;
int num = 100;
int result = num / zero;
Assert.Fail(“We are failing the test if it doesn’t raise an divide by zero exception”);
}
}
}

Write some test code using NUnit and you can start using it in your projects right away.

Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change: Kent Beck

Today I completed reading Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, by Kent Beck , Cynthia Andres. This books gives a brief idea about the Values, Principles and Practices of Extreme Programming. It also talks about how to get started with Extreme Programming and briefly about Theory of Constraints, Toyota Production System, Test First Programming, How to scale XP teams etc.

Author emphasizes that one should understand the core values and principles of XP first. A good read. I feel that this book only gives you an idea about what Extreme programming is. Each principle, value and practice by themselves are topic of exploration and learning.

I definitely did had inspiration from reading this book. Here are some of the inspirations from the book translated into my own words.

I have to work on things what experts call simple and obvious. Read this sentence 10 times and you will understand its importance.

Don’t wait for the perfect moment to start. Start immediately and you can always make change to the plan by doing a reflection ( This one disease of mine is the one that holds me back from doing many things. Tonight I plan that I should wakeup at 5 AM and start reading the book. Tomorrow, I would wake up at 5.30 AM. My mind tells, its not a perfect start.. Start reading from tomorrow., Heck.. How did the author read my mind..)

One cannot improve anything without first improving himself.

Probably this the first book, I read cover to cover after a long time. I feel refreshed and energized after reading this book.

Well, I am going to start another book tomorrow..