I have been in Austin Texas the last 2 days joining my CodeBetter mates Jeffery Palermo, Jeremy Miller and the one and only Scott Bellaware last night for a bbq at Jeff's house in Leander, TX. Jeff talks about it here. Then I gave a 2 hour talk on Extreme Programming with .NET to an overflow audience of 80 people at ADNUG! Not only did allow me to go over but 60 people stayed all the way to the end. Then we went out for some great BBQ at Rudy's. Jeremy has a nice writeup of the thoughts and seeds I am trying to plan and what I said. I went over how to use NUnit, NAnt, MSBuild, CC.NET, FIT, and talked about a lot of our personal experiences as well as some new material on Agile Planning and Estimation. In terms of what Jeffery wrote here, I was a disapointed that the whole flap happened about Rocky on DNR. Jeremy with a LOT of respect (which Rocky deserves) challenged his statements in a very graceful and respectful way, and was essentially forced to "back down" with all sorts of innane posts (there and a bunch of blogs that I won't link to) that people like us are "fragile", "Agile purists", extremists and all other sorts of nonsense. My message is this: Despite what the .NET community thinks, TDD IS WELL DEFINED, there is no quarell on what it is. Its defined in Kent Beck's book and the Austels book. That's TDD, period, end of sentence. So as Engineers we need to be precise in our terminology and not reinvent words, or else they lose all meaning. TDD is TDD. So we stick to those definitions because they define a working model for the last 20 years of many communities like the Smalltalk, XP and Agile communities have been using long before there even was a thought of .NET. We are not "Agile purists", we are just Agile. You are either doing TDD in the ways that has been accepted for the last 20 years and are TDD or you're not. You are doing Agile if you are doing all the practices or you're not. I'm tired of people trying to warp well established ideas around concepts like IntelliSense or the flawed and incomplete ways TDD and Agile are attempted in VSTS and MSF-Agile, and not expect us not to have a say in that as an Agile community that it is not TDD or Agile. I will no longer cave.
Anyway, my talk tonight was on effectively using tools that exist out there today to do XP and TDD and deliver business value to customers in short Iterations. It works, lots of us do it, and many more people got to see the value of it tonight. I'm so grateful to this wonderful group for their rapt attention, great questions and their presence. It was an honor. Thanks!
I forgot but Jeff Palermo reminded me, "Sam pointed out that the "simplest thing that will work" doesn't mean the simplest thing that will compile. That drew quite a few laughs from the audience."...