[LRUG] A talk suggestion

[Roland Swingler]

Yes sounds good. Be interesting to hear how you dealt with really
tightly coupled code leading to massive test setups if you faced that
problem.

Cheers,
Roland

On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 12:37 PM, Aleksandar Simic <asimic at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sounds really interesting.
>
> +1 for the talk.
>
>
> On 22 June 2010 12:30, Tim Cowlishaw <tim at timcowlishaw.co.uk> wrote:
>> Hey chaps,
>>
>> Chris O'Sullivan and myself have been doing  a lot of work recently taking a project that's been going on for a long time and trying to improve our working processes, test coverage, etc on it, which got me thinking - I've seen loads of talks and blogposts etc on best practices for TDD, Scrum, DDD and all the rest, but by and large they either only apply to a sort of platonic ideal of a software project that we never have a hope of implementing, or would be perfect for any new projects we start from scratch, but would be too costly to implement retrospectively on a project we've already been working on. What I think would really be useful is some sort of advice on bringing better working practices into old projects, that may have a huge amount of legacy code, deep-seated waterfall-ish processes, test coverage that's far from perfect, etc.
>>
>> Therefore, would anyone be interested in a lessons-learned type talk from either me or Chris or both at some point in the future, concentrating on how to make incremental changes to old projects to make them better. Specifically, we've been doing the following:
>>
>> Retrospective requirements gathering: Our 'product owners' are internal,and because of this there's been a certain amount of feature creep where the actual requirements hadn't really been captured as stories.
>>
>> Doing cucumber testing right: We've had both specs and cucumber stories on this project from the beginning, but some of the earlier ones are less than ideal, to say the least. We could talk about the various smells we encountered in old tests, the problems we caused, and how we fixed them, and perhaps talk about our ideal way of doing cucumber testing.
>>
>> Persuading project stakeholders and colleagues to be more agile, without them necessarily realising that's what they're doing: We're still in the process of doing this, and it may or may not be succesful, but it's an interesting experiment, and might provide some lessons worth sharing.
>>
>> Refactoring the crazy out of your database schema, and being agile without going insane if you're one of us masochists who actually likes SQL, the relational model, and designing schemaw upfront.
>>
>> If any of this sounds like something you'd like to hear, let us know!
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Tim
>>
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>>
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