After much hard work and gnashing of teeth, the beta of our next major release is finally out, including the new productivity pack and track changes. The internet Gods tried to stop us by cutting off our oxygen, er internet supply but the files finally made it across the pacific to our main servers. You can check it all out in the productivity pack section of Ephox.com. It’s a real beta in that we haven’t done any real testing on it and so it’s likely to have stability problems that we’ll iron out before the final release. We’re very keen to get feedback on the release, both in terms of any bugs you find and in terms of how to improve the UI, extra APIs to add for integrating it into backend systems etc.

I’ve found that doing TDD causes me to use, or perhaps just be more aware of using, some useful debugging and programming techniques. As a side note, it occurs to me that debugging and programming in TDD are essentially the same – in either case you’re trying to fix the failing test.

So while TDDing, I find myself asking “What’s different about this case?” in a way that I can’t ever recall before. It’s easier to think like this with TDD because you have a documented, repeatable set of situations to compare between. Sometimes a change you make to fix the latest test will cause others to break and it’s then that you need to determine what’s different about the new case that needs special handling. Developing without TDD, the question I’d tend to ask is “how should this work?” which is a lot broader and harder to comprehend. I still ask, “how should this work”, but it’s usually at the start of a story where I need to get my head around what needs to be done and get an overall view of the problem. Finding the answer usually means a bunch of scribbling on notepads or whiteboards going through the possible scenarios and determining what should happen. While programming, the scope is usually reduced enough that you don’t need to scribble on whiteboards, but I do find myself going over the various cases to narrow the question down to “what’s different about this case?”.
In the end, what it means is that TDD is documenting a lot of what I would otherwise do over and over in my head and getting me to the more narrowly focussed question more quickly. It doesn’t eliminate that mental process, but it does make it easier and provides a safety net for it if I miss a case.

We’re looking to move most of our servers into VMWare so that we can easily back up the entire system and restore it in case of hardware failure. We’ve moved our Jabber server and now buzilla into VMWare and the next most likely candidate is our Subversion server. I’m wondering if it makes sense to store large amounts of data in the VM directly or if we should look at putting the actual data store on the host machine, but all the configuration stuff in the VM.

One of the really core principles of XP is the idea of small, frequent releases. The most obvious benefit of this is that it allows users to see the product and provide feedback about what could be done to improve it. What’s not so obvious, but is part of the reasoning behind a number of XP principles, is that the developers benefit from this just as much, if not more than the users. Being couped up in an office somewhere slaving away creating software that no one’s using just isn’t fun. Getting your software out to users and having the feeling that you’ve achieved something is a big feel-good moment and it energizes the development team, allowing them to keep going full pace instead of getting tired and stressed.

In a comment on Software Teams Must Gel, James C. McPherson asks:

Given your brief description of the Ephox interview process, it would appear that you’re not in favour of people who work from home or are even more remote from your office. I’ve spent a long time working with remote management and geographically distributed teams.

There is, of course, no solitary correct solution, attitude or approach to building and gelling a successful software engineering or development team. I would be interested to find out what the Ephox perspective in on remoteness.

One of my keyword watch-lists pointed me to Matthias Ernst’s entry, A long term suspicion:

An observation: almost all WYSIWIG text editors suck at some point. We’ve been beaten up repeatedly for our CMS’s text editor but in comparison we’re actually doing pretty well.

Writing a good WYSIWYG editor is hard. Most people think it’s a trivial task until they actually try it and start getting user feedback about a million different things that they never thought about. That’s also why there are so many bad WYSIWYG editors out there – people start them thinking it will be easy and then find themselves in over their head, unable to keep up with the flow of bug reports, or simply sticking their head in the sand and complaining that the users just don’t get how to use the product.

We’ve been tracking a handful of metrics that we wanted to track about our code base for a while and it’s built up some pretty graphs that tend to indicate that our adoption of XP has improved the quality of our code. Obviously they’re just a guide, the real test of quality will happen when we ship the next release out to clients, but they’re useful none the less. The general trend shows a gradual improvement over time – fewer known bugs, lower complexity, more tests etc.

There is an interesting tendency in software development to try to keep the internal model as closely in sync with the output format as possible. When you control both, that’s probably not a bad idea – it simplifies serialization. What is important is that the user interface matches up precisely with the user’s mental model of how to use your software. Attempting to keep your model simultaneously close to the user’s model and the output format often forms contradictory goals.

A while back I saw a comment go by that raised my interest, it was something along the lines of: we know all our users want a better editor, but it’s just not something we can charge more for. My recent experience with Yojimbo and what I’ve seen of a number of people evaluating blogging systems, content management systems and anything else content-centric, tends to indicate that even if you can’t charge more, you’ll definitely sell more.

I’ve been playing with Yojimbo for the past week or so and it shows a lot of promise but just doesn’t quite make it across the line to something that would be useful. Essentially Yojimbo allows you to store stuff in a central location. You can add text files, web archives, PDF files, bookmarks, serial numbers and passwords. You can categorize them, label them and most importantly search them. It sounds promising and I’m sure that at some point it will be pretty awesome, but overall I found it disappointing. There were a few limitations that make it far less useful for me than it should be.

Slashdot linked off to an old interview with Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres, but it was interesting to see the number of people complaining about the pair programming aspect of XP. Comments like:

Programmers are solo beasts – putting two of these dragons behind one keyboard is asking for trouble.

and:

In the OO Programming course I had this year, they encouraged us to practice extreme programming. Well, it sucked… Everytime my partner and I encountered a little problem and one of us had an idea, he had to explain it to the other, which took at least 3 times as long as just typing it out, which in almost every case made the idea perfectly clear. Suffice to say, after about 4 hours we gave up and just sent each other any files we had edited (of course making sure we didn’t work on the same file at the same time).

If you happen to run a lot of JUnit tests in one go with Eclipse, you may find that towards the end they start to slow down or throw OutOfMemoryExceptions. They do that because the Eclipse JUnit plugin creates a new instance of the TestCase for each test method, calls setup, test method, tearDown and then for some reason keeps the object around. This means that if your tearDown doesn’t null out all the fields in the test class you can wind up with a whole lot of wasted memory.