Doug and I are currently busy replacing a third party library which we’ve used in our product for quite some time. Thus, the first thing we need to do is create a new component which behaves in exactly the same manner as the original component. Once we have that we can start adjusting the code to add features and work in the way we really want.

To ensure we get an exactly compatible replacement, we started out by creating a suite of automated acceptance tests against the original implementation and they all passed.  Then we removed the third party library and they all failed. From there we could gradually begin building our new component by attempting to make each acceptance test pass – one at a time.

Claim: TDD Generates High Quality, Maintainable Code

Proponents of TDD argue that by writing the tests first, you are forced to focus on how the component will be used and thus will come up with a better design. My experience has actually been the opposite; TDD encourages you to just do whatever needs to be done to make the test pass and not think about design at all. I’ve never copied and pasted code so much in my life and the number of times I’ve written code that’s so messy I feel like I need a shower is getting scary. That’s okay though, it’s meant to be that way. TDD encourages short-sightedness, short-cuts and general sloppiness and that’s a good thing.

So we’ve got a huge chunk of legacy code (making up 3 main products and a lot of integration products around them), automated builds after every check-in and a bunch of tests that are somewhere between unit tests and integration tests and a team of developers who haven’t had any significant experience with XP (excepting our new hire, Doug South, who’s to blame for the XP idea in the first place). Did I mention tight deadlines and ferocious competition? We don’t have time for down-time, we need to get this process up and running and quickly and smoothly as possible.

The Ephox engineering team has decided to start adopting XP, mostly to help improve quality but also to help respond more rapidly with the changing priorities and requirements that commercial software tends to live with. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to keep a fairly good record of the process here so that over time I can look back at the challenges we’ve faced and see how we’re doing. I’m also hoping that by detailing my thoughts and experiences here that the lazy-web will chime in with useful comments, corrections and ideas.

Loud Thinking:

Finally, the new economics of dynamic languages like Ruby simply makes reuse a lot less attractive. Since the cost of producing new, original code is so much lower…

Hang a tick, why is new code cheaper with dynamic languages? Sure, you can write the code faster but the vast majority of cost involved in code isn’t spent up front, it’s spent in maintenance. So writing new code hurts because you don’t take advantage of all the money already spent on maintaining existing code and instead incur extra maintenance cost.  Even if the initial cost of writing new code was reduced to zero, new code would still be very expensive purely because of the maintenance element.

I’ve been mostly ignoring the uproar about how Steve Jobs “lied” about how much faster the Intel iMac is opposed to the G5 iMac. Expecting benchmarks to reflect any form of reality is just plain ignorant of the complexities of modern computing.

Despite thing, there’s a great irony which has just dawned on me. If Steve Jobs is clearly lying about how much faster the Intel iMac is over the G5 iMac, then clearly he wasn’t lying when he was pushing the G5 chip and pointing out how fast it is compared to those crappy Intel chips. You remember those old photoshop bake-offs that everyone mocked right?

Here’s a tip for you, anytime you hear someone say, “The XML specs aren’t really that complicated”, you know they haven’t tried to work with XML in any detail.  For a start, as soon as you start using the term “specs” instead of “spec”, you’ve got something that’s going to difficult to piece together.  When you get to the vast number of specs involved when working with XML, you’ve got a weeks reading just to get through them all.

I’d like to be able to play around with the photos in my iPhoto library without having to export them first. Do APIs exist for accessing this stuff or is there an opensource library available somewhere that can read the iPhoto Library data? Google searches tend to indicate there isn’t any but I thought I’d ask the lazy web.

Brain Sparks has an interesting critique of the findings from that infamous study suggesting that users make judgments about a web site in the first 50ms. Turns out there’s no evidence in the study to suggest that users will leave your site if that first 50ms doesn’t look good – they’ll just think it’s ugly.

Thankfully, we’re not as fickle as some people seem to think we are.

Chris Pirillo has an intersting list of Ten Reasons Your Next PC will be from Apple. Some of them are the typical, run-of-the-mill reasons you hear everytime Mac vs PC comes up but some of them are really interesting, compelling reasons.  My favorite would be:

4. Knowledge. Don't let platform bigotry get in the way of understanding and appreciating good technology. We all are better for knowing more, and that's something you should look forward to doing – not avoiding at all costs. Bury the hatchet if you think that this still is the Mac you first saw in 1984.

This is the reason I have a Windows machine and a Linux machine to complement my main OS X laptop – it lets me be knowledgeable about the three OS’s and to be able to readily make the decision about which is best for a specific tasks, particularly because swapping OSs for a single task is straight-forward. Of course, if you’re a Mac user, this is an excellent reason why you should should put a Windows box within easy reach and preferably something like Linux, BSD or Solaris as well.

Following a Jobs keynote there’s always a ton of complaining about Apple, along with a lot of lusting over the new goodies. For my part my complaint with Apple is one that has been growing since the release of OS X – I’m sick and tired of Apple trying to make me buy stuff through them.

In fact, this started with the introduction of QuickTime Pro and the nagging to upgrade. In OS X we started seeing the addition of things like Buy Printer Supplies (which I’m sure used to be in Print Center but isn’t anymore – score 1 Apple), requesting a .Mac subscription during initial configuration, print photo books from iPhoto and since the advent of the music store, a ton of different links to it scattered through iTunes.

Dave Winer complains about Apple’s photocasting RSS being broken and while I’ll agree that it’s a shame Apple didn’t put more effort into interoperability, it’s also a shame Dave had to end with:

Assuming their intentions are good and they’re not trying to kill RSS, why don’t they put some of us under NDA and let us help them get the bugs out before they ship.

As if Apple have any reason to kill RSS when they’re going out of their way to leverage and promote RSS. How about letting the plain facts be enough criticism instead of having to tack on insinuating comments just to beat up the story?