Advanced TDD - An Introduction to Testing Patterns and Behaviour Driven Development

23 July, 2009 by Colin Angus Mackay 1 Comment

When

Glasgow: Tuesday, 13th October, 2009 @ 18:30

The Talk

There is more to doing TDD well than just Red-Green-Refactor, and creating a maintainable test suite as well as maintainable production software is vital. In this presentation we will look at common testing patterns, techniques and tools that can help make maintaining the test suite easier. From Shared Fixtures to Stubs and Mocks, we will take a look at common patterns that have been proven to work and the tools that help you take advantage of them. We will also take brief look at what Behaviour Driven Development is and the problem it tries to solve.

The Speaker

Chris Canal has worked at a Web Developer for the past 7 years. Starting with procedural languages like ASP and PHP, he quickly moved onto the .NET Platform when first released. A great believer is continual–improvement, Chris is constantly looking for new technologies, tools and methodologies that will help in creating robust and maintainable software applications and has become an active member of the Scottish Alt.Net Community to share his findings and ideas with like-minded developers.

The Venue

We are meeting in Room M402 on the 4th Floor of the George Moore Building at Glasgow Caledonian University, Cowcaddens Road, Glasgow, G4 0BA

Filed under Uncategorized

Credit Crunch Code – Time to Pay Back the Technical Debt

22 July, 2009 by Colin Angus Mackay Leave a Comment

When

Glasgow: Tuesday, 8th September 2009 @ 18:30

The Talk

Technical debt is the cost of putting off good development practices. This debt, must be paid back to avoid the “interest payments” becoming crippling. This presentation will focus on a number of common developer (and project) behaviours that can lead to the build up of technical debt in a project, and together we will discuss and collaborate on methods to mitigate against them.

The Speaker

Upon leaving school Gary went into the banking industry where he worked his way to (near) the top, leading a special projects group tasked with solving the problem of how America’s low paid could afford to buy housing. Having made a fortune by selling mortgages to people whom he knew could not hope to repay them, he then made a second fortune selling on that debt to large financial institutions. Shortly after that Gary was invited to leave the banking industry and now works as a technical evangelist for Developer Express. Gary is committed to the "community" in the UK, and further afield, and can often be found speaking at community events up and down the country; except DDD7, but he doesn’t care about that at all, nope not one bit.

The Venue

We are meeting in Room M402 on the 4th Floor of the George Moore Building at Glasgow Caledonian University, Cowcaddens Road, Glasgow, G4 0BA

 

Filed under Announcements, Events

Scot ALT.NET Event – Glasgow 6th August

14 July, 2009 by Colin Angus Mackay Leave a Comment

[Sign up here]

From Fluent Interfaces to HORN, Domain Specific Languages are making an impact on the Alt.Net ecosystem.  With the arrival of Oslo, Microsoft’s take on how to create Dsls, could they become part of most developes toolkits?  In the second Scot Alt.Net we will have a look at two different techniques to creating a Dsl and will take place in Glasgow on 6th August 7pm, Dell Corporation Limited, City Park, 368 Alexandra Parade, Glasgow, G31 3AU.

Boo

Domain Specific Languages is a topic that is very ‘in’ with developer buzz word popularity. Boo is a statically typed OO language with a Python based syntax. It supports Macros, an open compiler pipeline and has specific features that were explicitly designed to make DSL building easier. This overview will walk through the creation of an English like grammar that can be used to configure business rules for an application and can be reused across other applications with differing rules.

Oslo

It could be argued that the most valuable aspect of Microsoft’s ‘Oslo’ framework is the tooling it provides to create external DSLs. This talk will cover the basics of what is required to create and implement a DSL using Oslo. These steps will include (1) creating the grammar (2) parsing an input (3) deserializing the output to an object graph (3) generating code from the object graph. I will use my own Oslo DSL project bdUnit as an example.

About the Speakers

Paul Cowan has recently started his own business Cutting-Edge Solutions.  He is a keen advocate of iterative development, test driven development, continuous integration and modern techniques.  Paul is a regular committer to the horn open source project.  He recently gave a presentation on horn at the DSL at Microsoft in Seattle.  You can follow his blog here.

James Lynch is a Web Developer working for an Edinburgh based company Storm ID for the past year. He follows Agile and Kaizen principles as well as being interested in OSS and functional programming. A relative newcomer to development, bdUnit was James’ first personal project.

[Sign up here]

Filed under Third party events

Scottish Testing Group event

14 July, 2009 by Colin Angus Mackay 1 Comment

The British Computer Society’s Scottish Testing Group are having an event in Edinburgh on 24th August at Scottish Widows HQ in Morrison Street. See this PDF for details: http://www.scotland.bcs.org/stg_edinburgh_09_aug.pdf

Non-BCS members are welcome, although priority will be given to members if space is tight.

Filed under Third party events

FOWD comes to Glasgow

9 July, 2009 by Colin Angus Mackay Leave a Comment

The Future of Web Design conference comes to Glasgow on Monday, 14th September. Tickets are £59 + VAT (Although with the promo code SOTR you can get 15% off)

[FOWD Tour 2009]

Filed under Third party events

July Newsletter

7 July, 2009 by Colin Angus Mackay Leave a Comment

Welcome

It is that time of year when we are about to take a summer break and give ourselves time to sort out some great sessions for the Autumn/Winter schedule. This is the best time to get in touch and tell us what you want to know about. If you have any requests for topics for upcoming events then please get in touch with us at [email protected]

Alternatively, if you want an opportunity to get up and speak to a group of software developers on a software development topic or issue then we’d love to know about it. We are always on the look out for speakers who are enthusiastic and passionate about their topic.

Our final event of the season will be in Glasgow on the subject of Developer Testing for SharePoint by Richard Fennell. There are still a few places left if you are interested. If you are used to coming to our events in Glasgow, be aware it is at a different venue. We’ll be at the Ramada Jarvis Glasgow City Hotel on Ingram Street.

We’d like to congratulate Bob Jarvis, an Edinburgh based enterprise architect, on being awarded an MVP by Microsoft in the are of Solution Architecture. [More Information]

At a recent event we had a brief talk by Peter Munro who introduced us to IT4Communities who look for volunteers to help charities. He left us with some leaflets for people to take, but if you didn’t get to that event and want to know more, we’ve put posted the details on the Scottish Developers website.

Finally, we’re looking for book reviews. If you’ve read a development book recently and would like to review it for us we’d love to hear about it. You can get in touch about that by emailing us at the usual address: [email protected]. In the meantime, we’ve received a review by one of our members, Hamish Hughson, on the book Java EE 5 Development with NetBeans 6 by David R. Heffelfinger.

Regards,
Colin Mackay, Chairman, Scottish Developers

Events

15-July-2009 @ 19:00 in Glasgow (Scottish Developers)
Developer Testing for SharePoint
Registration Required - Cost FREE

Sponsor’s Message

EquatorEquator is a full service digital agency offering design, marketing, SEO and application development.  Our development projects range from CMS based sites to full business web applications.

Due to continual growth, Equator is always interested in hearing from talented developers.  If you feel you would enjoy a career in a vibrant, forward thinking company and have skills in any of the following ASP.NET, Javascript, jQuery, C#, SQL, CSS and HTML, then please do get in touch with Robert Graham or visit our jobs page.

Filed under Newsletter

Congratulations Bob Jarvis

2 July, 2009 by Colin Angus Mackay 1 Comment

Scottish Developers would like to congratulation Bob Jarvis, an Edinburgh based enterprise architect, on being awarded an MVP by Microsoft in the are of Solution Architecture.

Bob has operated for many years on the business/technical architectural intersection and besides working closely with Microsoft for over a decade, is fairly well known in international Enterprise and Service Oriented Architecture circles. He also works closely with the National Computing Centre in the  EA and SOA training and IS/IT best practice guidance areas.

Robert (Bob) Jarvis has been recognised for his continued contribution to the architect community by the award of Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in the Solution Architecture category.  MVPs are exceptional technical community leaders from around the world who are awarded for sharing their high quality, real world expertise in technical communities. Microsoft MVPs are a highly select group of experts that represents the technical community’s best and brightest, and they share a deep commitment to community and a willingness to help others.  For more information on the MVP program, see http://www.microsoft.com/mvp .

An accomplished architect with over 40 years of experience spanning many industries, Bob Jarvis has authored several books on Enterprise Architecture and articles in the Microsoft Architecture Journal, presents at industry events, conducts training workshops and consulting engagements.  In recent years, Bob was actively involved in numerous Microsoft eHealth consulting engagements in England, Scotland, Central and Eastern Europe – working with our [often scarce] local architects.  His most notable contribution is as a leading author of the Microsoft Connected Framework – Architecture and Design Blueprint, its second edition released earlier this year and available from http://www.microsoft.com/industry/healthcare/technology/Healthframework.mspx .

More information about Bob Jarvis, his accomplishments and activities is available on his company site http://www.systems-advisers.com/

Filed under General