Atomic Spin :: Elements of Software

Video from my presentation at RubyConf 2007 (Enhancing Embedded Development with Ruby) is now available at the Confreaks website.

See the full video

I’ve just given this presentation at Rubyconf 2007. And now you can enjoy it too:

Keynote file: Enhancing Embedded Keynote

PDF version: Enhancing Embedded PDF

Video: Full Video from Confreaks

Atomic and our developers invest a lot of time in professional development. Everyone attends at least one conference or workshop each year. This year we presented at or attended the following:

• Austin Workshop on Test Automation
• Embedded Systems Conference
• Rails Conference
• Dr. Dobb’s Architecture and Design World
• Agile Conference
• O’Reilly Open Source Convention
• Google Test Automation Conference
• Ruby Conference

The October meeting of XP West Michigan featured “what I did on my summer vacation” talks from Atomic Object developers. Five atoms gave short, informal talks on interesting things they learned at recent conferences. Read the rest of this entry

Patrick Copeland gave a presentation at GTAC 2007 about Google’s approach to testing. Most importantly Google focuses on developer testing. Rather than set up software testing teams for each development team, they promote unit testing, automation tool building and developer responsibility for test suite quality. In order to disseminate these ideas, they created what they call the “Test-Certified Ladder”. It suggests a set of small steps to get any development team going on testing:

1. Setup testing tools
2. Learn technologies and techniques
3. Improve test suites

Google also has what they call “Test Mercenaries”. These are specialized teams of dev-testers that arrange time-boxed relationships with development teams to help them improve their tests. Often pairing directly with their partner teams, these mercenaries have a few responsibilities:

1. Introduce new technologies
2. Refactor code
3. Train developers

Finally, Google has a number of methods to disseminate testing knowledge throughout their company:

• Testing on the Toilet: restroom postings of new test technologies, test suite reports, etc.
• Testapalooza: all-day conference where testing ideas from across the whole company can converse.
• Code Green: a monthly magazine-style internal publication, specific to testing at Google

Every presentation from GTAC 2007 is available online at youtube.com.

We just recently got a last minute notice that we’ve been accepted to present at the Embedded Systems Conference, Silicon Valley 2007. Greg Williams and myself have the honor of presenting a 90 minute tutorial on the Test Driven Development approach Atomic Object has been developing for embedded software. The presentation will cover AO’s Model Conductor Hardware design pattern and the tools we’ve developed to do unit testing and mocking in C.

Our presentation is entitled Mocking the embedded world: practical TDD , continuous integration, and design patterns. The name plays off both the use of mocks in our approach and the challenge we were once given to make Test Driven Development work in embedded systems.

I have to say thank you to the folks over at James Grenning’s Agile Embedded Forum. Our threads of conversation have been quite helpful in refining the eventual presentation of our concepts and work. The timing of those discussions has truly been serendipitous.

I attended the Great Lakes Software Excellence Conference late last month. One of the tutorial sessions was put on by Tim Lister. Tim, a co-author of Peopleware and Waltzing With Bears, describes himself as a “Team Zealot” and “Risk Management Zealot” respectively in regards to these two books.

As one who has not yet read Peopleware, I found Tim’s insights, coaching and encouragement to be refreshing. His presentation gave a glimpse of what the book Peopleware contains.

One of the many hats Tim wears is that of a part time arbitrator specializing in software system disputes. Drawing on this experience he made a telling remark, “almost every dispute is emotionally based.” Neither Tim’s talk nor his book concentrate on disputes, but Tim clearly grasps the soft side of software development – it’s the people that make software succeed or fail.

I organized my notes here in an attempt to summarize Tim’s presentation.

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Last week, my colleagues and I attended the Agile 2006 conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Amongst other sessions, several of us attended the stealth session on Agile practices in the embedded domain. The session was one of the best I attended and I came away with three new, significant pieces of knowledge.

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