Leandro Boffi

The next Saturday, September 26th, at UP (Mario Bravo 1050) in Buenos Aires myself and many other Lagash team mates will be speaking at Microsoft CodeCamp conference.

Mariano Sanchez, Rodolfo Finochietti and me will be talking about building web applications with the ASP.NET MVC Framework, in a session called “Desarrollando sitios web escalables con ASP.NET MVC”, scheduled in the mid-day at 12:30.

We will provide an introduction to the right use of the ASP.NET MVC framework, our demo will cover the core concepts of it. As a bonus track we will show how to use jQuery to pimp our application and provide a better user experience.

If you didn’t register yet, don’t miss the chance, I promise you won’t be disappointed: http://www.codecamp.com.ar

Hope to see you there!

I was thinking in to explain you what a nerd dinner is, but if you are a nerd or a geek, you’ll probably know what it is.

When: Aug 06, 2009 @ 7:00 PM

Where: Guemes 4248, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Twitter Topic: #nerddinnerba

Register here.

Hope to see you there!

As part of my tasks at Verizon Business I’ll be evangelizing about Test-Driven Development, due to some teams in my area are interested into implement this wonderful technique but they never use it before. This is very positive, I think, because they usually take care about the quality of his work and the use of TDD helps a lot with this task.

Doing some research to prepare my presentations I found that lot of people has the wrong idea that if they work with TDD they will be losing time. They has the crazy idea that if they don’t write tests they are saving time, they see the write of tests as and expense rather than an investment.

If I don’t use TDD I’ll have the things faster

To believe that if you don’t use TDD you will have the things faster is a big mistake. First of all, to compare velocity and times of different processes the outcome of these must be the same for all. This belief is assuming that the result will be the same with or without TDD and that’s simply wrong. TDD brings a lot of benefits: clean and decoupled code, reduced use of debug, and the most important: certainty.

It is true for the short-term, if don’t write tests and you go directly to the implementation you probably (at least in trivial cases) got the code written faster that if you use TDD.

In the other hand, you should see the things for the long-term, and if you have experience working at the software industry you will probably know that a big problem at many software projects is the rework (I recommend you to read this paper about software quality and the cost of rework). The certainty that TDD brings to you will make you to avoid a lot of rework and debugging or at least make it easier.

A picture worth more than thousand words:

In a few words, working without TDD seems like gambling, you can win a lot and faster, it is very tempting, but due to the uncertainty there is a lot losing possibilities: risk.

TDD will not solve the changing requirements problem, it will not solve the existence of functional bugs due to requirements misunderstanding, etc, what I’m trying to say is that TDD will not eliminate the risk inherent to any software project, but It will reduce it, at least a little, providing a little of certainty.

Continuing with the analogy, using TDD is like gambling but cheating (having a little more of certainty)…

Regards!