Gojko Adzic

I’m thinking about organising a one day or half-day seminar on the current state of agile acceptance testing for managers, team leaders and senior technical people some time in September. If you are interested or know someone who might be (maybe your boss needs to know about these things?) drop me an e-mail or leave a comment below. The seminar would be based on the research I did for my upcoming book, and would cover the following topics:

• key benefits that teams from my research are getting from agile acceptance testing, specification by example and behaviour driven development
• key principles to implement this properly
• key practices to support the principles, and how teams from my research use them in different contexts
• key pitfalls/problems experienced commonly by the teams covered by the research
• some generous time for Q&A

Here are the things I’d like to know from you:

• would half-day or full day be better? (full day would allow us to go more in-depth, but that means that people would have to take a day off work)
• do you have any specific questions you could like to have answered?
• does the schedule make sense? how can I give you more value with this?

The long term benefits of agile acceptance testing come from live documentation – a description of the system functionality which is reliable, easily accessible and much easier to read and understand than the code. In order to be effective as live specification, acceptance tests have to be written in a way that enables others to pick them up months or even years later and easily understand what they do, why they are there and what they describe. Here are some simple heuristics that will help you measure and improve your tests to make them better as a live specification. Continue Reading »

Meet me for an online webinar on Effective Specifications for Agile Projects. We’ll start at 7 pm UK Time / 2pm EDT / 11am PDT on July 15th. Here’s the abstract:

Fast turnaround and short iterations require a very efficient and precise specifications process to provide direction. Two emerging practices of specification by example and agile acceptance testing enable agile teams to specify, deliver and verify better. This webinar will teach you about these practices and how to implement them in your project.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

• how to ensure a shared understanding of specifications by all stakeholders
• how to manage requirements to provide details just in time but ensure that all development team members have enough information to work
• how to ensure that the product built is fit for purpose
• how to know when you are really done with a story
• how to facilitate change in software with live documentation

The webinar is free for participants, but you have to sign up for the webinar upfront.

Speaking at the DDD exchange conference today, Greg Young said that doing doing domain driven design is impossible with a classic three layer architecture where DTOs are being shared across layers. He then presented CQRS and Event Sourcing, which according to him provide a much better way to design complex systems. Continue Reading »

Udi Dahan spoke today at the DDD Exchange about common misunderstandings and problems that teams have with implementing Domain Driven Design. According to Dahan, the domain model pattern seems to be abused more often than not. Continue Reading »