SpecFlow 1.5 introducing Step Intellisense in VisualStudio

SpecFlow is aiming at providing pragmatic BDD for .NET.

SpecFlow 1.5 comes with Intellisense for step-completion in VisualStudio 2010:

When you are writing feature files, you get Intellisense after Given/When/Then/And/But keywords.
As usual you can trigger Intellisense with Ctrl-Space.

The feature is switched off by default. You have to enable it under Menu –> Tools –> Options then choose SpecFlow. In the Editor Settings set 'Enable Intellisense' to True:

SpecFlow can be downloaded from GitHub.
SpecFlow 1.5 comes with various improvements and fixes. The full changelog is here.

Keep your specs flowing!

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SBB Developer Day 2010

Last Tuesday I was invited to give a Talk at the SBB Developer Day.

Here is my Prezi: Automated Testing: The Developers Viewpoint

Automated Testing: The Developers Viewpoint on Prezi

The SBB Developer Day is a full day conference that SBB organizes for their IT staff. Most part of the day is organized in three parallel tracks. All together there were about 170 people attending the conference.


I really enjoyed the program of the conference and the other presentations. I found the quality and the experience of the conference very positive, which is remarkable for a pure "in-house" conference.

I had an interesting short conversation with @grabnerandi from Dynatrace about combining continuous performance testing. He had some very interesting ideas about the lower right quadrant of the Agile Testing Quadrants.
Andy gave a very interesting presentation about "The Top Performance Problems in modern Applications".

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Rewrite It!

For a lot of projects a throw-away prototype would be the right thing to do... but people are very afraid of throwing away software.

This idea of throwing away your project can even be taken further than prototypes! TekPub has proven that, read it here:

• Architecting TekPub - Moving from ASP.NET MVC to Ruby on Rails
• Upgrading Tekpub with Rails 3

It seems that TekPub has been completely rewritten two times since going into production about a year ago (and several times as spikes before and after going into production).

This is the very realization of some interesting concepts:

• Deliberate Discovery
• Build Less
• Race to Running Software
• Ship It
• Rework

 

Compare that to your corporate legacy enterprise project ... sure it can't be compared, but why? Couldn't a rewrite be more effective than the uncontrolled growth we all observe in legacy applications?

It would mean that you also have to keep your enterprise applications slick and lean. Why is that so hard in corporate IT?

The challenges in rewriting legacy enterprise application are probably the missing stakeholders, the missing original goals and the lost knowledge of the current teams. And those rewrites that are attempted often end up in a gigantic technically driven framework monstrosity... probably because that is easier to do than thinking about business value.

This seems to be an omnipresent pattern and leaves the sour question if corporate IT is really the place you want to be ... especially if you compare it to the seemingly challenging and adventurous parallel universe of web startups.

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