AgileJoe - All Comments

re: Need to get something off my chest

Jeff Brown — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 07:17:00 GMT

Joe,

I think you may be undervaluing the implementation concerns vs. the conceptual ones.

The xUnit community has largely reached a consensus as regards to tests consisting of fixtures containing multiple test cases with with one or more assertions of which there is a moderate assortment involving validation of state and behavior.

So why have MbUnit, NUnit, xUnit.Net, CSUnit, MSTest, and more all within the .Net space?

Well, because each framework differs in how the general concepts have been applied. There is significant engineering effort involved here to optimize across a wide range of details.

MbUnit v3, for example, emphasizes rich reporting, extension by subclassing, broad applicability to unit testing and integration testing scenarios, and powerful integrated tooling.

Other projects emphasize other objectives. xUnit.Net is a fascinating study in minimalism, test semantics and language-oriented programming.

It's FASCINATING to watch these ideas and systems develop!

Ironically, I just finished writing a reply to a query about providing enhanced database integration testing support in MbUnit.

I explicitly questioned whether this was something that really needed to be reinvented. Moreover, I cited an existing implementation of these ideas for inspiration (NDbUnit).

Before anything happens wrt. database integration testing in MbUnit, we'll be sure to make a proper study of what's out there, to decide our approach. I fully expect in this case that we will adopt someone else's work, contribute enhancements, and build more cool stuff around it.

Unfortunately other time it turns out that the existing tools don't meet out desires, but it's always worth looking anyway because it can help us to better understand our true needs!

I am quite happy endorsing and supporting the excellent work of others.

I am also quite happy to borrow and learn from others when I perceive a significant opportunity for improvement in the form of a new implementation.

Anyways, that's it. There's no malice or neglect involved in choosing to rebuild a tool fashioned after those others have built before; there is only quiet respect and genuine admiration.

re: Need to get something off my chest

Scott — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 22:20:04 GMT

/s/choice/choose

You mean we don't have 12 grammar checkers for this little comment box already? ;)

re: Need to get something off my chest

Scott — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 22:19:19 GMT

"Choice, as Scott pointed out choice, is good when the person doing the choosing is informed "

See, here's the thing about being uninformed. You don't *know* you are uninformed until someone points new information out to you. At which point, you become informed and, once again, don't know that you are uninformed.

So there are three or four unit testing Fx for .NET. Why should I not write a fourth? Maybe I have an idea for doing things differently (a'la xUnit) that will make the process of writing unit tests easier/smarter/better.

I mean, should we have stopped with Xerox PARC? Why did Microsoft come out with .NET when Sun had already written Java? Do we need another GC framework that runs on Windows?

Shouldn't we all be driving Model T's 2008 edition? You have your choice of colors provided you choice black.

re: Need to get something off my chest

Jeremy Gray — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 22:17:06 GMT

@Joe - I've been popping by that group from time to time to see what is going on, and will be sure to both continue doing so as well as to pass the link on to my team members and associates who are interested in the subject.

re: Need to get something off my chest

Joe Ocampo — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:56:26 GMT

@Jeremy Gray

Understood I have been known to become very passionate from time to time.

You thoughts are completely inline with my vision on what would be great for the .Net community.

About the only thing I would like to add is that there is a mailing list I created a while back for BDD:

groups.google.com/.../behaviordrivendevelopment

pass it on. There has not been that much activity around it though.

re: Need to get something off my chest

Jeremy Gray — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:38:51 GMT

@Joe - Your initial post's slightly ranty tone got me into a slightly more ranty mode which seems to have escalated bit by bit with each of my replies, so don't read too much into that particular phrase. ;) The short alternate take is that it doesn't help .net BDD when, for example, I see Concern, Context, Scenario, Spec(ification), etc. all showing up at roughly the same spot in the various frameworks' usage examples.

My particular backstory, complaints, etc. aside for the moment, I do think that in general we would be in violent agreement on the point around the silence of those working on and releasing alternate projects. It obviously would be helpful if they piped up and worked with the other projects to figure out where a new project could best fit into the space and what everyone in the space could do better.

In case this hasn't been thought of so far, both (potential) end users and new project owners could probably benefit from having a bit of a central rallying point for BDD in .net. If new users had a one-stop shop they could go to to learn about BDD, how to apply it in .net, what the available tools are and how they compare, what their styles are, where each one shines, etc., and if tool owners could go there to openly and transparently collaborate to align each tool to better support their particular applicable cross-section of the user space, I could imagine that being a win for everyone. Perhaps something as simple as a wiki, but preferably something stand-alone, identifiable, and polished, that could be given link-love from every which way so as to get it ranked nice and high. Add in a syndicated feed covering the various authors and contributors for the various tools, maybe some forums for people to talk BDD as it both relates and does not relate to specific tools, etc. and I think you'd come out with something really quite beneficial for the community.

Not that I have the time or inclination to start it up, of course. ;) My personal suggestion would be for the project owners to gang up and do it for the benefit of all.

re: Need to get something off my chest

Joe Ocampo — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:27:46 GMT

@ Jeremy Gray

BTW How are you involved in all this, I don't see your name associated with StoryQ or the post I referenced? Just asking for sanity sake.

re: Need to get something off my chest

Joe Ocampo — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 20:26:55 GMT

> my client doesn't pay me to talk to you and wait for new versions of NBehave.

I am not suggesting that you drop what you are doing when you have a thought about improving an idea or concept on an existing framework. I completely understand your perspective and why you did what you did. All I am saying is that we haven't received any feedback concerning NBehave other than, general question regarding usage scenarios.

> trying to spearhead some kind of .net BDD tool unification revolution.

My goal is not tool unification so much as it is about collaborative thought. Like you mentioned I have gotten what I wanted out of this post and that is the feedback and motivation for similar thought models. While you mention that my timing correlates to your post. I was addressing your post so much as I was addressing the code of of StoryQ who's initial checkin was Jul 23 so the thought model had a month to churn. Again my focus is on communication not the code.

But having read the comments from others in this post and your comments, maybe in open source software, when a developer create a similar project to your own that is their form of communication. It is more of pull model then a push model. It is up to the other the other frameworks to pull the intentions of creation the expect to be involved in the thought stream. This is just counter to how I work on a day to day basis.

> ... Either way, get your terminology in check

hmmm I will have to take that as constructive feedback. I don't want to read into it.

re: Need to get something off my chest

Jeremy Gray — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:37:14 GMT

@Joe - no offense, but I think you are still missing the larger point. As much as I might like them to, my client doesn't pay me to talk to you and wait for new versions of NBehave. They pay me to deliver.

Put yourself in my shoes for a moment. You want to go BDD. You look around. The existing tools are in general very stale. Progress is unclear. They can't even agree on terminology. They try to take over for good tooling you already have in place. And drop features while doing it. By forcing a tooling change, they eliminate the ability to use yet _other_ supporting tooling you already have in place. Rolling your own will take less than a day, and that's including time to demo a few alternate syntaxes to your team. Maybe you'll need to take another half-day to layer on more reporting later, but you don't need that degree of output right this minute. Your client is looking at their watch. What would you do?

This going to sound snide, but: reading the above paragraph, you should consider yourself lucky to be getting any feedback at all. I've already had to drop more than an hour of billable time today just to give you what I've given you so far. Again, just trying to get you to put yourself in my shoes for a moment.

As for the "thought stream" as you put it: We're in it now, but I'm honestly not sure you can really expect a dialog to have been opened any earlier. I coded yesterday, you posted last night, I responded this morning. I wonder how many others already have rolled their own BDD for the same reasons I did but aren't surfacing in the comments. Had you not posted with such good timing, I wouldn't have surfaced either. Why? Because the existing BDD tool projects need to get their fundamental issues sorted and I need to move on. You got lucky on this one and I came out of the woodwork to give feedback.

You will keep seeing new tools pop up as long as the existing tool authors fail to resolve the existing problems. The onus is on you, not on would-be end users who need to deliver and therefore roll their own instead of (as it seems you might suggest) trying to spearhead some kind of .net BDD tool unification revolution. They have neither the time or reason. In the meantime, you shouldn't blame them. Especially not the ones who rolled their own and shared it so that others might benefit.

Go talk to Scott, Jeremy, et al. Get things sorted amongst yourselves. Put up one consistent front. Or at least put up a small number of opinionated fronts but where the pros and cons and situations for each are clearly spelled out. Either way, get your terminology in check. Then cut some releases, as neither you or Scott have released in ages. Then and only then _might_ you be able to justify getting upset when things like StoryQ pop up without you hearing about it first.

re: Need to get something off my chest

Colin Jack — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:43:59 GMT

"One of the reason personally why we haven't focus on the Story Runner is that frankly it creates a lot of unnecessary friction. I didn't realize at the time I created it (although others pointed it out) but the jury is still out on the applicability of Story Runners, so who knows."

Definitely interesting especially as it doesn't match my own experience.

Writing acceptance tests is definitely hard but whether I use a story runner or not has little effect on that complexity, neither does switching to context/spec. The difficult more comes from making sure the data is there for the AT, working out out to write complex multi-step AT and that sort of thing.

Having said all that I've seen enough to think its worthwhile and I definitely saw some the benefits Dan North was going for.

Oh and I should also say that experience has taught me one thing about good acceptance tests, code wise they need a lot of reuse so composition is key. Thats one of the many reasons I think xBehave has some legs, though I also use context/spec a lot (basically for everything other than acceptance tests).

re: Need to get something off my chest

Joe Ocampo — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:53:11 GMT

@Jeremy Gray

That is what I was looking for! :-)

I wanted to know all your opinions regarding why you chose to make a new one vs. contribute to an existing project. That "thought stream" never took place between anyone. Could it have helped NBehave? Could it have helped you and I better understand BDD? Could we have come together and elicited greater concepts? Could you have learned the difficulty oh why certain directions where taken? The fact is we will never know the answer to these questions because the dialog never occurred.

The reality is that what you did in short period of time is great but you NOW made known issues that Jimmy and I were not even aware of.

One of the reason personally why we haven't focus on the Story Runner is that frankly it creates a lot of unnecessary friction. I didn't realize at the time I created it (although others pointed it out) but the jury is still out on the applicability of Story Runners, so who knows.

Again the focus was not to discount your efforts but draw attention to the fact that as a community we don't communicate with one another to help learn from each other.

re: Need to get something off my chest

Jeremy Gray — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:44:54 GMT

@Joe - some people are operating under greater pressures than you seem to think. I didn't have time to go and talk to every tool creator to figure out why they did things the way they did and what I could do to change it for my environment. At the end of the day I needed to deliver, and after surveying what was available and finding both that none was appropriate and that it was far faster to create one than to talk and modify, I knuckled down and created one. I can easily imagine that this is how many of the existing tools came to be and later came to be made available publicly. Heck, some of the existing tool's authors have made that quite explicit in their documentation, posts, etc.

re: Need to get something off my chest

Jeremy Gray — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:39:32 GMT

Whee! It showed up with formatting! :D

re: Need to get something off my chest

Joe Ocampo — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:34:19 GMT

@Jon

I agree with your points.

Microsoft perspective is probably based on market capitalization and intellectual property more then anything else. Is this ethical, well in my opinion no. But does it make share holders happy, probably.

re: Need to get something off my chest

Joe Ocampo — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:29:49 GMT

@Nate

>Isn't choice a *good* thing?

Choice, as Scott pointed out choice, is good when the person doing the choosing is informed and understand the context on which the problem context to which the solution has been provided matches best.

I don't have a problem with other BDD frameworks in .Net. Several exist already a new ones are being created. The issue I have is that before you go and create a new one *TALK* to the contributors of the other frameworks to insure you understand directional influence and ideological constructs. If you idea does not fit then of course why would you create a new project. BUT if it matches or enhances the thought, then contribute to the project. In only helps everyone in the end.