Day 2 of the Agile course (provided by Exoftware) at UCD. Most of yesterday (day 1 that I missed), was good , but standard introduction , including:
- Differences between RUP (Rational Unified Process), Extreme Programming (XP) and Agile approaches.
- The XP / Agile Planning Game.
- Problems with the existing software development process.
Today (Day 2) is a lot more ‘hands on’ in that it’s straight into the computer labs to work through the example that we’ll be using for the rest of the week. Two of the more interesting items that we’ve covered today (apart from working through the ‘Build a system to play blackjack’ example are:
- Comparing Test Driven development to Design by contract. In this comparison, the code to setup your unit tests are equivalent to your pre-conditions, and the assertions within the JUnit tests are the post conditions.
- Separation of concerns on get / set: each should do one thing , and one thing only
The worked examples from today (Mock Objects and Video Store) are also very well thought through and get the point across.
Paul Browne 