Brian H. Prince

LeanDog is an interesting company. They are located in Cleveland, on a barge. Yes, a barge, on the water. They run an agile shop, and deliver software solutions for their customers. The great thing is that they open up their space to a whole host of community events. I love it when companies ‘get’ why they should support and adopt the community. Jon, the founder, has an amazing amount of passion for agile practices, and experience helping teams adopt them. TDD is an amazing practice. It has had a huge impact on how software is developed today. It has shifted how tech teams look at writing software, and has dramatically increased the initial quality of the software, and reduced the long term maintenance costs as well. The trick with it is that it is very hard to learn, and takes at least six months if you are learning it by reading books and blogs. It is just one of those skills that you need to do with someone to fully get. You can reduce the learning time by doing this. If you a...

The Patterns & Practices team has been pumping out a lot of great content lately. So much, that I haven’t been able to keep up with it all. What I like about their new model, is that they publish their works in draft or beta form to CodePlex.com, so that they can gather community feedback. The latest guide from them is titled “Acceptance Test Engineering”, and can be downloaded from here . Please read it, and provide some feedback, any feedback back to the team. P&P is a great example of how some groups in Microsoft are embracing the community, and leveraging their input to make their products better. I think this guide will be of interest to lead developers, consulting managers, project managers, test leads, and architects. This guide focuses on the skills around Acceptance Test, and how to implement them. The first section focuses on thoughts behind AT’s, and why we need help defining ‘done’ on our projects. The second section reads like a patterns book. It is chock ...