Guess who’s guessing?

Well well well, here we go again, yet another fit of February Fury from Mother Nature, but that won’t stop me from being away from my code or being away from my blog. MoffDub here on the one and only Excellence In Programming web-ring, here to present you with a tale of estimation happiness.

Eventually, getting wrongfully chewed out by incompetent PHBs gets old, so, one day during sprint planning, my cohort got out his pen and calculator and started guessing approximately how many days the work we had for each story would take. By “day”, I mean a relatively uninterrupted six-hour period, and multiply that by two for the two of us working together.

Why six? Because out of your eight hour day, you are liable to lose two hours to unplanned interruptions, and that context-switching cuts into the productivity you experience while in your “programmer flow“.

Test Incest

Don’t you just love my cutesy rhyming post titles?

You can’t hate me, though, because I make sure most of them are entirely relevant. And this post is about the incestuous unit tests I write, and how they have bitten me.

Professionally, I have never been in the position to use a mock object framework like JMock or NMock. My mocks have been more like fake objects, since they were hand-written and always returned pre-cooked responses.

Since I had to hand-write these objects, I took what seemed to be a smart course of action.

I can’t believe I get paid for this

Greetings ladies and gentleman, your favorite bitter clinger is here and back for 2009 with new material. Watch for a new episode of Nowhere To Run this Saturday.

I arrived back at work, after a two-week vacation, fearing the worst: public static everything, classes that I had carefully crafted to have one responsibility now having two or more, bloody red bars all over my unit tests, long parameter lists.

The damage wasn’t as widespread as I imagined. I wasn’t the only one on vacation, after all. There were scattered unit test failures. There is only a couple of slightly long parameter lists. There was even one constants class inheriting from another constants class, and based on its usage, I actually don’t have a problem with this.