Atomic Spin :: Elements of Software

Now available: The sample project we distributed on CD to complement our presentation at Embedded Systems Conference Silicon Valley 2007.

Ron Jacobs, a traveling Microsoft evangelist and host of ARCast.TV and ARCast Radio visited the Atomic Object office last week and we chatted for quite a while about TDD, MVP and Presenter First development methodologies for his podcast.

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Code reviews are a common practice intended to catch software flaws by having “more eyes” on a piece of code in order to catch costly software defects. Unfortunately, many people dread code reviews, because they are time consuming and many times are not very fruitful. It takes a lot of discipline and similar mindsets to really get a cost-effective benefit out of code reviews. Not to mention that reviews often get slowed by people nit-picking implementation, code style and even arguing over where a comment, paren or brace should go!

For those of us that practice test driven development, we have an added luxury that all of the functionality in our code is backed up by unit, integration and system tests, or some mix of these. These tests also serve as living documentation of the code at hand.

Therefore, it seems that reviews of tests, which verify requirements, would be a much more suitable and beneficial initiative. After all, aren’t we all most concerned with what the code “does” and not so much “how” it does it? The tests capture the requirements put on a body of code, and that is really what is most important to be sharing with fellow developers. This technique would avoid many of the hurdles that inhibit traditional code reviews. Furthermore, changes to tests or addition of tests (requirements) could be done live in a code review and eliminate another round of reviews to ensure all concerns have been addressed. This all leads to less bookkeeping and happier developers!

This excerpt from an interview with David Gelernter caught my eye. I found a link to the interview in the comments for a thoughtful blog post about SilverLight.

Q: What is the pragmatic role of beauty in technology?

A: ...[B]eauty is the best value in software because it’s the best tool in managing complexity. If I have to build a tremendously complex machine, if I make the machine elegant, the lines clean, simple & beautiful, the chance is greater that I will be able to understand it and master it than if I slop together some jalopy of a program.

Beauty in mathematics is often a hint of correctness. This is the underlying truth that I see in “Do the simplest thing that works.”

Some shameless bragging… Atomic’s international exposure is ramping up.

Justin DeWind’s JsMock project recently got a mention in a presentation at the German JAX 07 Konferenz for Java, Enterprise Architekturen, SOA: “Testgetriebenes Ajax”, Link and Klemm.

Scott Miller recently returned from two weeks of work in Belgium helping a client apply test-driven development in a C++ project for an automotive testing application.

Carl Erickson will again be teaching Software Craftsmanship this summer at Uppsala University in Uppsala, Sweden.

We recently got a question from one of our customers on writing and running test suites for multi-platform applications (the case in question involves Java). The thread of discussion follows. First, we have Andy’s original question. Next, Karlin and Dave respond…

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