ThoughtWorks Geek Night - Techniques For Producing Quality Software August 27, 2008

Geek Night Double Bill - Techniques for Producing Quality Software

MbUnit - Unit Testing on Crack!
Andrew Stopford

If you're unit testing in .NET, you're probably using test frameworks like NUnit or MSTest. These frameworks are handy but don't encourage efficient testing, wasting your time as you write libraries of custom asserts and fixtures. Stop writing a vast number of asserts to ensure your test are effective. Stop writing custom asserts or fixtures to get around limitations of these frameworks. Save time. Save money. Make your tests run to their full potential. This session will look at MbUnit an open source unit testing framework for .NET that can do all that. It's unit testing on crack! (This talk was previously given at AgileNorth 2007 and now updated for the v3 alpha release.)

Andy Stopford is a software engineer, blogger and author from Manchester, and a new dad to his beautiful baby girl. He was MbUnit’s former lead and its current poobah.

Eliciting Quality Goals
Chris Morris

For one software project, the most important quality might be accuracy, followed by usability, followed by scaleability. For another project, other goals might be important, and the order of priority might be different. Developers are effective at meeting the quality goals that they feel are important, and different views on the priorities for quality are a common cause of conflict among developers. Ensuring that all the developers understand which sorts of quality matter most to the end users and those who are paying for the project is an important step towards success.
Unfortunately obtaining clear and accurate answers about quality goals is not easy. This workshop will model in a short time a way of eliciting a ranked set of quality goals. Participants will have an opportunity to discuss the different types of software quality and the trade offs between them, in the context of an experience that will equip them to elicit quality goals from the stakeholders of their current and future projects.
A quality policy consists of a ranked list of goals, processes which it is beleived will attain those goals, and a plan for checking whether the goals were acheived. The workshop will make such a policy, based on a consensus view among the participants. However, the emphasis will be on the fact that each project needs its own quality policy.

Chris Morris has worked as a software developer on a variety of projects, including four years as a project manager and team leader. He began his software development career by developing in IBM assembler language for a utility company and went on to become a web developer for an ISP. Later he joined a UK government research laboratory with the brief of developing software to support biologists, and eventually became a project leader of a multi-disciplinary team developing a laboratory information management system for molecular biology in 2005, a post he still holds.

Official Website: http://manchestergeeknights.wetpaint.com/page/Techniques%20For%20Producing%20Quality%20Software