Examples from Unit Testing 101 Talk

I’ve given my Unit Testing 101 talk several times in the past month or two. I really love this talk because it’s fun to give and it’s obviously something I’m more than a little passionate about. It’s also a lot of fun because, unlike the majority of my talks, I’m spending the majority of the talk writing code. I don’t get to do that anywhere near enough in my day job, so it’s a kick to go do it while gabbing with community hommies!

You can find the before and after VS 2010 solutions here on my site. The “slide deck” is really a Prezi which you can find online here.

Tools used

• NUnit – the test framework I wrote all the tests in
• Rhino.Mocks – the framework I demonstrated for mocking out dependencies
• ReSharper – Gives me a test runner, quick templates, and scads of other goodies
• CodeRush – Another productivity tool for a runner and tons of other joy
• AutoHotkey – Enables the next tool
• JP Boodhoo’s BDD AutoHotKey script – makes it easy to write test_cases_with_underscores

References I mentioned at the end of my talk:

Books

• Roy Osherove’s Art of Unit Testing
• Bob Martin’s Agile Patterns and Practices in C#
• Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas’s Pragmatic Unit Testing in C#

Thanks to everyone who attended my talks, particularly the great folks at MIGANG – that’s one of the best interactive audiences I’ve had in years!

Book Review: Managing Humans

Managing Humans by Michael Lopp. Published by Apress. ISBN 159059844X.

I’m torn by this book. There’s a lot of really useful, interesting articles in the book, but it feels like much of the content is barely reworked from the author’s blog, Rands In Repose, and the amount of over-the-top gratuitous profanity really make the book feel unpolished. (And those who know me well are howling that I’m complaining about profanity.)

Putting aside those two objections, I found a number of good pieces in the book. There’s a whole lot of great things about dealing with people in tense situations, and many of the pieces end up pointing back to how you should have been more aware of what was going on. For example, one article discusses how to deal with an employee who explodes about something he feels is important. The article walks through getting the person calmed down and reaching a good resolution with them – but the last paragraph throws it right back in your face with something along the lines of “But you need to remember that the person felt the only way to get your attention was to explode.”

There’s plenty more like this, with the book covering dealing with your people, the people who manage you, and keeping a close eye on empowering your own career. Lopp uses lots and lots and lots of examples cut right out of his own career, which is really nice. The topics he cover are obviously things which are real world issues, not contrived, theoretical dealings.

The rest of the book keeps up this same style: some good reading, some uneven content, some throw-away F-bombs and excrement quips, and occasional amazing flashes of “Wow, I really need to take a closer look at myself in the mirror” moments.

Overall it’s a fine read. I’m not sure I got my money’s worth out of it, but it’s a good read all the same.

Upcoming Webcast: Three Tips to Improve Your Dev Process

I’m giving my “Three Tips to Improve Your Development Process” talk tomorrow (Thursday, 7 Oct) at the Cincinnati Programmer’s Guild.

This talk covers how you can improve your development process by implementing daily standups, regular retrospectives, and improving your estimation. These tips work regardless of whether you’re in an Agile, CMMI, or complete chaos process environment.

I’ve just found out the Guild’s leader, Troy Davis, will be streaming the presentation on UStream. You can find the stream here. The show should start about 6:30 if everything goes well and the AV gods behave themselves.

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

I’ve got a somewhat busy October for speaking!

• This Thursday (7 Oct) I’ll be talking at the Cincinnati Programmer’s Guild hosted at Max Training. I’m giving my Three Tips to Improve Your Development Process talk. This is one of my favorite talks because it hits a few specific things you can do to improve your development environment regardless of where you work: Start daily standups, use retrospectives, and get a handle on your estimation.
• Saturday I’ve been invited to kick off the Software Quality Firestarter in Mason (Cincinnati) with my talk on Testing Web Applications with Selenium. This is an intro-level talk, plus I pass on a LOT of hard knocks lessons we’re learning while using Selenium at my work. It’s a 60 – 75 minute talk with an incredible amount of goo crushed in to it. (There are still seats open for this event, so go register!)
• Finally, Justin Kohnen and I are teaming up at the Dayton .NET Developers Group on 27 Oct to cover a few odds and ends in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. I’ll be showing off some of the neat goodies helping you get rolling with Test Driven Development. I will also talk a bit about the web test framework and show some uses of it for creating simple performance tests. Justin will be covering some of the goodness around ASP.NET, configuration deployment support, and some other things. I always love co-presenting with Justin because he’s wicked smart and geeks out on all these cool toys.

Let me know if you’re going to be at any of these events. It’s always nice to put a face to blog readers or Tweeps!