• Crystal Clear: Process Miniature

    The Crystal Clear methodology urges you to reflectively improve your process and to rapidly teach team members and business owners how they interact with the process, Allistair Recommends a technique called "Process Miniature"

    In a nutshell, this is a team excersise where the members go through a smaller condensed version of the process. Usually 1 hour to one day long.

    Kent Beck and others have come up with Extreme Hour for extreme programming. It can be studied here

    Scrum has a process miniature in the CSM class. Ken Schwaber's sample CSM class contains a description of it (where you make brochures). Hopefully anyone can follow this link

    If anyone knows of any other process miniature resources, please let me know. (such as FDD or DSDM)

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  • Setting up Fit and Fitnesse

    Framework Integrated Testing? Bah, i can't remember what it stands for but basically there's 3 types of testing you can do in software: Unit Testing, GUI-less UAT, and GUI based UAT scripting. (in the order of least to most expensive to maintain and utilize).

    I find it ironic that most software companies try to script the UI with web apps, maybe because it's fairly cheap in comparison to scripting the UI on windows based apps? I don't know

    Anyhow, i was going to talk about Fitnesse... i set off to learn about it since the the guys over at PCG who go to AgileKC meetings said it was useful.

    Basically, think of fitnesse like a wiki that  you can enter in data grids for tests right into the page. Then you can execute the tests right there on the page. Ideally if you had a release going you could get one page for the whole release, hit test 1 time and see right away if anything was broken.

    Some people squirm when you say you're going to test without the UI... what exactly are you testing then?

    Again, the guys over at PCG make a great point and say, "It's no alternative to your Wattin(?) or your Mercury scripts on the UI, however some of your checkpoint tests could be done in FIT instead, and the GUI based scripts are more of a smoke test to verify the pages load.

     

    Cory Foy writes great tutorials on how to setup fitnesse and fit on your machine and here's links to the downloads:

    http://www.cornetdesign.com/2005/11/fitnesse-and-net-basic-tutorial.html

    http://www.cornetdesign.com/2006/02/howto-fitnesse-actionfixture-in-c.html

    http://fitnesse.org/FitNesse.DownLoad

    http://fit.c2.com/wiki.cgi?DownloadNow

     

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  • NAnt Intellisense

    I wanted to enable intellisense in visual studio with NAnt and i saw this great blog article on Scott Hanselman's blog. However, it was a little bit out of date for my taste.... so what i did was this:

    I went and did a search on google for "Nant XSD"

    then i did a save target as... on this link

    and i saved it to:

    C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\Packages\schemas\xml\nant.xsd

    Then inside visual studio... i opened my *.Build file and went to the properties pane. Where it said "Schema" i clicked the "..." and added my new nant schema into that list and 'selected' it.

    schemas.jpg

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