There is some discussion going on here about whether software tools work well for managing Agile processes or whether going manually with index cards and sticky notes works best.  Is your team practicing Agile?  If so, what works best for you?

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO of Thycotic Software, an agile software services and product development company based in Washington DC.  Secret Server is our flagship enterprise password management product.

Jimmy has posted with sage advice on White Lists versus Black Lists and more from Day 4 at DevConnections 2009 in Las Vegas.

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO of Thycotic Software, an agile software services and product development company based in Washington DC.  Secret Server is our flagship enterprise password management product.

Jimmy does it again with Single Responsibility Principle and other .NET Best Practices.  Don’t miss the next in his Top 10 Takeaway series from #devconnections.

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO of Thycotic Software, an agile software services and product development company based in Washington DC.  Secret Server is our flagship enterprise password management product.

Jimmy has posted again with the Top 10 Takeaways from Day 2.  Keep it up Jimmy!

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO of Thycotic Software, an agile software services and product development company based in Washington DC.  Secret Server is our flagship enterprise password management product.

Jimmy is at DevConnections this week and is promising to have a new blog post every day.  We will see how that works out! :)

Here is his first installment – Top 10 Takeaways for SharePoint.

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO of Thycotic Software, an agile software services and product development company based in Washington DC.  Secret Server is our flagship enterprise password management product.

Kevin has posted about Recursive Table Expressions on the team blog.  This is something that the team is using on some new product development when working with the Active Directory nested structure.

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO of Thycotic Software, an agile software services and product development company based in Washington DC.  Secret Server is our flagship enterprise password management product.

How many times do you have a data point in your application that is a date but not a datetime? For example:  birthdate, receiptdate, licensedate, etc.  Things can get really weird when doing date math if these “dates” have times on them – for example:  2.33333 years instead of 2.32.   We have even seen some strange things happen with timezones - 8/2/1955 00:00 becomes 8/2/1955 01:00 (still puzzled by this one although I have seen it a few times).

Kevin explores some solutions to this problem in our latest team blog post.

The one option I have seen several clients use on projects is to store the date as a varchar(8) in YYYYMMDD format.  While the ISO formatting does allow sorting, it just feels icky.

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO of Thycotic Software, an agile software services and product development company based in Washington DC.  Secret Server is our flagship web-based password management product.

David has a Strategy Pattern post on the Thycotic team blog in the expanding series of Design Pattern posts.  This one focuses on the Strategy Pattern and the flexibility it can bring to cover future implementations.

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO of Thycotic Software, an agile software services and product development company based in Washington DC.  Secret Server is our flagship web-based password management product.

Ben has a great new post on the team blog in our ad-hoc “design pattern” series.

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO of Thycotic Software, an agile software consulting and product development company based in Washington DC.  Secret Server is our flagship web password management product.

Pouya has posted about the dangers of illnesses when Pair Programming on our team blog.

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO of Thycotic Software, an agile software consulting and product development company based in Washington DC.  Secret Server is our flagship web password management product.

Ben has posted about the Facade Pattern on the team blog.

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO of Thycotic Software, an agile software consulting and product development company based in Washington DC.  Secret Server is our flagship web password management product.

David has posted about how Truth Tables can be used to make it easier to consider all variations of input and output for your programming logic.

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO of Thycotic Software, an agile software consulting and product development company based in Washington DC.  Secret Server is our flagship enterprise password management product.

Jimmy has posted about PartialMocks on the team blog.  This has been a recurring discussion on our team and it is worthwhile thinking careful about whether to use PartialMocks and if so, what is an appropriate usage …

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO of Thycotic Software, an agile software consulting and product development company based in Washington DC.  Secret Server is our flagship enterprise password management product.

Read my latest post about Registration Forms on our team blog here.

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO of Thycotic Software, an agile software consulting and product development company based in Washington DC.  Secret Server is our flagship enterprise password management product.

Josh has posted an interesting review of Geoffrey Moore's classic "Crossing the Chasm" - this is a must read for any software product company.

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO of Thycotic Software, an agile software consulting and product development company based in Washington DC.  Secret Server is our flagship enterprise password management product.

There is a new post on our team blog - it is poking fun but still makes you think. :)

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO of Thycotic Software, an agile software consulting and product development company based in Washington DC.  Secret Server is our flagship enterprise password management product.

Mark Needham posted about a behavior pattern he has observed and labeled "The Code Fairy".  The concept is writing code in off hours (without your pair) when your programming pair didn't want to go along with your changes.

Being a fully pair programmed shop, we come across issues like this a lot.  Typically the solution is to compromise and find the middle ground.  However, this can be difficult if the views are radically different.

Some possible solutions:

• Agree to write a small piece of the code on your own later and present it on your next pairing session as a patch.  This will take good soft skills though since you may be even more defensive of your approach once you have written code and your pair may start feeling forced into the idea.
• Find the smallest possible compromise.  If a pair can't compromise at all, then you have bigger problems.  Remember that each person on the pair has to concede on some things else there is no give and take.  The trick is to concede where it is not detrimental - either way, someone will learn something.
• Mark's mentions the idea of being able to convince someone.  In the business community, it is often recommended to start a business with a partner since if you can't convince one other person of an idea then it probably isn't worth doing.  This holds true in pairing - if you can't convince someone, why not?  Is the idea flawed? Are you conveying it poorly or is the person not compromising at all?

Pairing is a learning experience and sometimes you learn through debate, other times you learn by doing.  Sometimes you have to fail to learn - just make them small failures. :)

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO of Thycotic Software, an agile software consulting and product development company based in Washington DC.  Secret Server is our flagship enterprise password management product.

Kevin has posted the second part to his refactoring logic in ASP.NET series.  This time he looks at hand rolling a mock object and also talks about the importance of separating your logic.

Don't forget to subscribe to the Thycotic Team Blog about Software Development (regular postings every Thursday).

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO of Thycotic Software, an agile software consulting and product development company based in Washington DC.  Secret Server is our flagship enterprise password management product.

Kevin has posted about refactoring some simple logic from an ASP.NET page and breaking it out into a separate class (Single Responsibility Principle) to make the code more maintainable.

Kevin highlights the classic problem with unmaintainable code and works his way into how to not only improve this code but also how to make it more testable.

Don't forget to subscribe to the Thycotic Team Blog about Software Development (regular postings every Thursday).

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO of Thycotic Software, an agile software consulting and product development company based in Washington DC.  Don't forget - we will be holding our two-day Test Driven Development course next month - reserve your spot now.

Last Wednesday (3/25/2009), I presented at the DC ALT.NET User Group in Alexandria.  Thank you to the groups organizer, Matt Podwysocki for inviting me.

Writing Code with the Thycotic Team

The presentation was TDD with C# and Mocks - which is a hands-on coding session with the audience working on a real application (our online store codebase) - the new code is designed to track website visitors for marketing purposes and it has lots of external dependencies (cookies, database persistence).  The goal of the session is to demonstrate how the Thycotic team would write code using C#, RhinoMocks and the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP). 

Single Responsibility Principle

SRP involves writing mostly new classes since everything is almost always a new responsibility and therefore gets its own class (see also the Open Closed Principle since SRP works well with the concept of open for extension, closed for modification).  This makes it easy to work in legacy code if you adopt SRP as you seldom modify the existing code but rather spend most of your time developing the tests and behavior in new classes and then wire them in where necessary.  There are many other benefits to SRP including testability and reduced coupling.

The audience at the event was engaged and asked lots of interesting questions.  There were questions regarding the wire up of dependencies which led to some tangents on Inversion of Control containers and so on.

Fishbowl Conversation

Matt also held a fishbowl conversation in the beginning of the meeting which seemed like a fun way to get attendees engaged and sharing opinions. I hadn't seen this used before but I was impressed with the concept.

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO of Thycotic Software, an agile software consulting and product development company based in Washington DC.  Don't forget - we will be holding our two-day Test Driven Development course next month - reserve your spot now.