OT: PSP, XP, TDD and other methodologies for solitary programmers

[Brad Clements]

I apologize for not expanding the acronyms in my original post. They've been
expanded by subsequent posts (except SAPDB is http://www.sapdb.org)

If you guessed that PSP was python server pages instead of Personal Software
Process, then you probably couldn't have contributed your PSP experience (or
at least, experiences about the PSP  I had in mind) ;-)

This URL:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ExtremeProgrammingForOne

Has some older stuff but interesting on it, including "Sandglass
programming" which is an interesting idea, but there doesn't seem to have
been much follow up on it.

I'm looking not just for heavy-weight methodologies, but all ideas that
improve the process for a solitary programmer. Including, how often to get
up and stretch (since you likely don't have a water cooler to hang out at ..
well, I do, but the only one I can talk to there is my dog).

Regarding TDD. I'd like to find a website that shows common test patterns I
can use.

On my monster project, I'm having trouble designing reasonable tests for a
lot of it, because it's basically all relational database storage. I am
abstracting the storage aspect from "business objects", but I need to test
not only the objects, but also make sure the objects are stored in the
database correctly and restored properly.

I've used a proxy design (a fake db and cursor object) to capture sql
execute's, but I need to go beyond that. Anyone have any suggestions on
testing objects that persist themselves as database rows?

Thanks

--
Novell DeveloperNet Sysop #5

_
"Peter Hansen" <peter at engcorp.com> wrote in message
news:3E1467EE.93860EC4 at engcorp.com...

> I tried during my seven years as a consultant to implement things like
> PSP for myself.  In all cases, the results were not useful, other than for
> one very important thing: they made me sensitive to the issues and laid
the
> foundation for my adoption of XP when I discovered it.

Thanks for the feedback. Did you find the record-keeping overhead of PSP to
be too "expensive"?

> There is no "code review" step in XP.  Code is reviewed second-by-second
> by your partner during development, and any time someone refactors it
after
> it is working.

Oops, I better re-read extremeprogramming.org more closely :-(


> Another very useful one has been to start using
> an "issue tracker" to track all issues with the project, and to prioritize
> them aggressively, in order to limit scope creep.  I'm constantly amazed
> that I ever got anywhere with previous projects (and by comparison I did
> not) when I had no focus on the concept of *business value* and let myself
> "play" in unproductive but very fun directions during the work.

We've started using ZwikiTracker.. I just wish my customer would be more
involved in entering and managing open issues and following my progress on
the wiki.

> But if you do nothing else, TDD alone will probably help you far more,
> and with far less cost, than any heavy process such as the SEI/PSP stuff.
>
> -Peter

Thanks for the tips.






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