Week 225

I’m afraid this week’s notes are going to be short and sweet, because I haven’t been anywhere near as organised as I was last week.

We’re continuing to beaver away on FutureLearn. We had a good “show-and-tell” at the end of last week – it was good to get positive feedback from the project stakeholders.

We’re working on two-week sprints for this project and this week is the 1st half of a new sprint. We’re more used to working on one-week iterations and so it’s been interesting to try a different approach. With the two-week sprints it’s possible to spend more time doing things like the planning game and a thorough “show-and-tell”, but I do wonder whether the extra “ceremony” is as efficient in the longer term.

The perennial question of how to organise our tests, particularly Cucumber acceptance tests, has reared its head again this week. I know I struggle with the lack of constraints when writing Cucumber scenarios. I feel that the lack of constraints means that it’s all too easy for each developer in a team to take different approaches and to end up with a real muddle.

I may have remembered this incorrectly, but I’m pretty sure James has previously told me that it’s this very lack of constraints that he likes, because it tends to ensure that his test is not coupled to the implementation. Although I do agree, I’d still like to find a good set of patterns/rules for writing & organising scenarios. I’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking about it this week, so I probably ought to try to write up my thoughts in a bit more detail at some point.

Anyway, our most important bit of news is that Tom became a father over the bank holiday weekend. Many, many congratulations to him and his other half, and welcome to Frederick!

Have a great weekend, everyone.

– James.