Industry Misinterpretations 164: Going for the Longball

November 29, 2009 12:02:55.562

This week James and Michael spoke to Kent Beck, perhaps the best known advocate of XP (Extreme Programming and Test Driven Development). The conversation covered a lot of ground, going over Smalltalk, testing, software development in general, and finishing up with an idea for "going for the longball" with Smalltalk.

This podcast was a lot of fun - I'd like to thank Kent for the taking the time with us.

To listen now, you can either download the mp3 edition, or the AAC edition. The AAC edition comes with chapter markers. You can subscribe to either edition of the podcast directly in iTunes; just search for Smalltalk and look in the Podcast results. You can subscribe to the mp3 edition directly using this feed, or the AAC edition using this feed using any podcatching software.

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Technorati Tags: extreme programming, xp, tdd, smalltalk

Enclosures:
[http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/audio/2009/industry_misinterpretations164.m4a ( Size: 26689495 )]

Comments

SUnit and XP origins

[Yanni Chiu] November 30, 2009 20:24:12.324

I've read that XP was inspired by various Smalltalk team's day to day practices. Here's one data point.

Back in 1993/1994, I was working on a peristence framework at Footprint Software. We wanted to support saving objects to: RDB, VSE ObjectFiler, and INI format text files. I set up a test class that ran various test cases. Each test case was a method with a prefix 'test'. The test class would use reflection to find all the methods starting with 'test', and run them for each of the three persistence backing stores. A popup menu to run a doIt would allow the test cases to run with a single click. After I checked in the code, the guy working on the code with me said "this is great", and proceeded to re-factor the framework code, run the tests to make sure nothing had been broken, and add new test methods.

BTW, we had Kent Beck come out for a few days to help us speed up the code. Later on when the first SUnit code was released, I remember thinking "we already do that". Years later, when reading about XP and its origins in Smalltalk teams, it struck me that we were probably one of those teams.

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Industry Misinterpretations 164: Going for the Longball