How To Ruin a Good Idea

by Dmitry Kirsanov 14. November 2012 19:29

Here is a short story of a good idea gone bad, and a good lesson for mobile application developers.

The Preamble

We find ideas everywhere. The best place to find a good idea is where you wouldn’t look for it. The dump, graveyard, museum, park or simply the street of your city at night (in other words – any uncommon place for you) may bring something that would keep you busy for the next year. Or show the pitfall to avoid, and sometimes this knowledge comes with the price.

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Test Driven Development in Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server

by Dmitry Kirsanov 27. December 2011 14:50

Team Foundation Server 2010This is the 3rd post in a series of articles about Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 for developers. And this time it is about test driven development. Previous one is available here.

 

Test Driven Development is the concept, which dictates creating unit tests before actually writing the code. To help you to understand this, let’s assume that you are writing the calculator program. And that whole calculation process is done by a separate class named Calculator with functions such as “Addition”, “Subtraction”, “Multiplication” and “Division”.

Now, according to Test Driven Development process, you should first create the test project, and write your tests for each of these functions. Since you know what result should be given for what input (like – “2 + 2 = 4”) you can make your tests to assert, that if you are running the Addition function with parameters of 2 and 2, the result is 4. If the result is different or exception occurs – the test is failed. More...

Team Foundation Server 2010 For Developers part 2 - Advanced Source Control

by Dmitry Kirsanov 4. December 2011 11:03

This is my second post about Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server for Software Developers. The previous one is here.

Now that you know how to submit your code to the source control, associate work items and use that information in your daily work, it’s time to learn the rest two things we skipped in the first part. The Branching and the Shelving.

Team Foundation Server is an Agile-oriented platform, and therefore many of it’s concepts supports the existing models of Agile Software Development. One of such models is Source Code Promotion Model, which basically means that your code moves through 3 stages – development, testing and production.

A word of warning: each model of Agile is a double bladed sword. It expects you to meet the conditions which will make this model effective, and if you fail to comply – you’ll get ineffective implementation, which could ruin your software development efforts. In case of Promotion Model, make sure you have a dedicated team of testers – not just developers from other project who came to rescue, but professional testers who are not doing any development. If you don’t have dedicated testers – forget about Promotion Model. More...