Behavior-Driven Collaboration
Eegads, how time flies. At the March 6th meeting of pdx.rb, I gave a short talk introducing BDD (Behavior-driven development) with a couple examples from RSpec. Since David Chelimsky has already done a terrific job writing an introduction tutorial, I decided to focus more on the big picture of BDD. My take is that BDD is some rather sweet glue that can foster collaboration across the spectrum of folks involved in software development, from clients to designers to developers to users. So far, we’ve got a lot of turf wars going on, and as in any war, there are casualties. In software there are crappy products, tortured users, unhappy developers, exasperated designers, cost overruns, and misunderstandings galore. BDD isn’t some magic salve that can be slathered on a messy process like butter on a toasty English muffin and make it all better, but I do believe it has promise.
So, here are the slides from my talk. (Right-click and Save As… Sorry, MIME types are not set right at the moment.) Unfortunately, in a tremendously idiotic move born of high stress, I deleted the original slides before I had uploaded them. Fortunately, I had some notes and a partial earlier draft, so I was (mostly I hope) able to reconstruct them. There is unfortunately no audio from the talk. As with most slides, these are marginally useful without it, but browse and feel free to ask questions.
There is one part that seems highly promising to me and easily attainable now. As you know, RSpec allows you to spec the views separately from the controller. This is a fantastic tool that interaction designers could use to communicate with developers. The syntax that an interaction designer would need to learn is fairly simple (most interaction designers are not developers), and you shouldn’t have much (if any) conditional code in your specs anyway (conditionals being one of the more difficult parts of programming to get right in my experience). The specs can accompany wireframes and provide another artifact of communication that bridges the different domains of interaction/interface design and development. Exciting stuff.
Rubinius Hits Primetime: Let the FUD Begin
For being a very young project (Evan’s been working on it about a year, but it’s only been in the public view for a few months), Rubinius has quickly hit primetime with the first (that I know of) FUD-ish review The basic premise is that pypy had money, minds, and at least one goal to produce a simpler VM than CPython, but as it nears 1.0 it’s much more complex than CPython. And since Rubinius is at least lacking in official monetary backing, it’s got a real tough row to hoe. Maybe; but I’m unconvinced.
The jury is still out on the mind-share Rubinius will ultimately attract. We’re certainly not sneezing at anyone’s contribution. And if you hang out in the channel, you might notice some rather interesting conversations between the JRuby folks and the Rubinius folks. You’ll definitely hear conversations about PIC, STM, concurrency models that make you go “Ohh” (thanks MenTaLguY), the possibilities of LLVM, even JIT’ing (though, to hear JP tell it, we’re hopelessly unqualified for that). I’d guess a who’s-who on Rubinius would turn up some rather accomplished folks. Personally, It is encouraging that I didn’t have to write the book on compilers to be able to hack on Rubinius. But really, do you have to know everything to jump into a project and start learning and applying it?
Let’s just say, I’m sure glad Linus was not deterred by the fact that IBM, SCO, AT&T, and Micro$oft had billions of dollars to spend on operating system development. Anyway, I’ll bet the “Yes, but does it scale?” posts will be showing up shortly. C’mon JP, live a little.
View archives for March 2007.