Extreme Programming - All Comments

re: Code Comments

dsmyth — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 21:51:56 GMT

Hi, I just walked into a new job where their project was 3 million lines of badly designed uncommented code. They're philosophy was write self-documenting code as comments are timely to maintain.

I couldn't believe it, code should be commented!! How and what you comment is important but you just need to comment. I'm with you 100%.

They also didn't draw UML or database diagrams. Everything was kept in the heads of the developers.

re: Tenet of XP: Paired Programming

dsmyth — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 21:00:04 GMT

hi, pair programming is an interesting idea but where I feel it comes into it's own as a programming approach is when you pair program with a doman expert/customer/someone who knows the business requirements.

It's ok having two programmers working in pairs as a sharing knowledge/learning exercise but the quality of the code doesn't necessary improve if two programmers work on a piece of functionality.

If both programmers share a wrong idea of the requirement or if both make the same assumptions then quality won't necessary improve.

I've pair programmed with a domain expert and it works well. I'm all for it!

Comments Smell

HMK's Spurious Thoughts — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 17:38:17 GMT

Here's some code from the rather interesting blog "Extreme Programming - Simulating an XP project": public string SaveToXml() { XmlDocument document = new XmlDocument(); //Create a root node called task XmlElement rootNode = document.CreateElement("Task");

re: First Series of Tests

bmains — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 02:10:10 GMT

Jens,

First, this application isn't a localized application; it was meant to use English notation. That may be a good feature to add for a future release. I'll have to do a spike because I'm not quite aware of how date formatting works for different regions.

Second, I was afraid that there might be a time stamp appended to the Date portion, which would not be validated the same potentially. I found out through testing on another project that the time portion isn't usually provided anyway, so my concern wasn't really a concern after all. But I wasn't aware of that at the time.

Thanks for your comments. And thanks for your vote of confidence!

Brian

re: First Series of Tests

Jens Winter — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 11:11:16 GMT

Hi bmains,

The first test (TestCreateOneTime) will fail on my machine. My environment settings support another format for dates (Germans usually use another format). The Test would pass if I check against "01.10.2006".

Besides this, I don't really understand why you are checking against a string representation. This isn't what the test should do. In my opinion the test should prove that the due date of a newly created task is initialized properly. This doesn't have anything to do with date _representation_.

So what I would do is this:

Task task = new Task("Test", new DateTime(2006, 10, 1));

Assert.AreEqual(new DateTime(2006, 10, 1), task.DueDate);

or perhaps:

DateTime dueDate = new DateTime(2006, 10, 1);

Task task = new Task("Test", dueDate);

Assert.AreEqual(dueDate, task.DueDate);

Btw, nice and interesting blog! Thanks for your work. :)