I’ve been preaching for a few years about how you should not maintain a 1-1 correspondence between TestCase and tested Class. David Chelimsky just blogged one of his experience in that regard, in a way that makes the case clearly and concisely.

Early last week (at SDWest) I ran into Gregor Hohpe. I know Gregor from my days at ThoughtWorks. Anyway, some time ago, Gregor moved to Google. Anyway… back to the point. Gregor asked whether I’d like to give a talk at Google. I, of course, jumped at the opportunity.

Friday after his morning talk, we piled into Gregor’s car and drove up the 101 to Mountain View & the Google campus. I gave my “BDD in Ruby with rSpec” talk (to appear on Google Video soon). The crowd was large and very receptive.

We had a great time. Google is truly an awesome place. Nothing I had previously heard did it justice, or prepared me for the magnitude of it.

No… don’t bother asking… I can’t say anything more.

I’m in Allen Holub’s talk this morning… “Everything you know is wrong: Inheritance and getters/setters are evil”.

I was excited to see this talk on the roster. Not only is it a topic I’ve harped on and have always been in agreement with Allen, but I have a similar talk submitted to SDBP this fall.

Allen started off with the classic “tell, don’t ask” talk. He makes on very good point that hadn’t occurred to me before. To really get benefit out of an Agile process (specifically XP) you NEED to be doing OO properly. If you aren’t, you will fail.

Quite a bit of time was spent discussing the problems with implementation inheritance and the advantages of interface inheritance and composition.

Next Allen moved to why encapsulation is so important and why getters & setters are such a problem. Don’t bother getting flustered about that idea.. he’s 100% on the money. If you disagree you need to learn what OO is.

One nice soundbite: “Doing it this way (interface based, using design patterns) lets me have to think less. Thinking is hard… I’d rather just program.”

The bottom line(s):

• There is no such thing as perfect
• Design is a series of trade-offs
• assess risk, then make reasonable decisions
• there’s often is a better way of doing things than the first way you think of

We’re in the AJAX & REST Patterns class now… cool stuff.

Very cool stuff. This makes web app development interesting. Add in Rails and we’re on track.

We just got to this morning’s AJAX talk in time… however not in time to be able to fit into the room.

Nice.

There’s a two parter all this afternoon that we are hoping to get into.

We went to the Jolt Awards Ceremony tonight. The Dr. Dobbs Excellence in Programming Award was awarded to Bruce Schneier (Mr. Cryptography).

The Jolt Awards themselves had high points and low points. On the high side, I’m overjoyed that “Agile Web Development with Rails” won the Jolt for Technical Book.. a rare and dignified honor indeed Congrats guys! Not only that, but Rails won the Jolt in the Web Development Tool category. Kudos to DHH and 37 Signals.

Another high point was that Clover by Cenqua won a Productivity Award in the Testing Tool category.. Way to go, guys! Great folks, great company, great tools. I had the pleasure of meeting in person & chatting with Peter & Brandon tonight after the awards.

The low side, Microsoft won several Jolts for Database Engine (SQL Server 2005), Development Environment (Visual Studio Team System 2005), and Libraries, Frameworks, and Components (.NET Framework 2.0). To add insult to injury Visual Studio was awarded this year’s Hall of Fame entry. I hope this doesn’t mean that the SD Conferences are becoming M$-suckupathons.

One more thing.. for those that don’t know yet… Dr. Dobbs is absorbing SD Magazine. A New & Improved Dr. Dobbs will be on the stands soon.

I did my Intro to jUnit4 talk this morning. It went well with good discussion and a couple dozen people.

If you’re using Java 5 go get jUnit 4.. it’s cool.

I spent the first half of this morning listening to Alistair speaking about Agile Software Development and the Cooperative Game. Very interesting.. and my first time hearing Alistair speak.. a true showman.. it was very enjoyable.

Our first dive into the world of AJAX.

OK.. so it was largely a intro to Ruby & Rails….

ok.. so it was largely an intro to Ruby… we slipped out at the break. Good if you wanted an intro… but not much beyond.

I gave my BDD in Ruby tutorial this morning. It seemed to go well. There were favorable comments on both the content and the style. The is the first talk I’ve given using a Takahashi inspired style. I’ll post the slides in various formats before long. Given the style, I’m thinking that a video with voiceover might be the most useful. Also, I’ll be evolving the tutorial section of the class into a full blown rSpec tutorial and posting it along with an rSpec reference document.

There’s already some press on the tutorial. One of the attendees, The Braidy Tester, blogged about it. And here’s another by Ed Gibbs.