Lot's of time i find myself working to shorten compile and build times. While most people agree with shorter is better for compile times, the questions of what is short? and how important is it? seem to remain vague and seemly open to judgement. It's not. So I wanted to take a moment to clarify it. vBlogged my thoughts here You can see the excel sheet here and read the Joel on Software Thread here

Recently had some issues with the method assertNotNull(object) because it doesn't help with any of the 4 principles of TDD. Specifications Feedback Regression Granularity I vloged my thoughts here. Finally, here's the code I was looking at. and check out www.approvaltests.com

OK, this isn’t news, this study came out a couple of years ago and was covered by many people then. But, I find myself regularly referring to it trying to find the link. So I’m going to blog about it then I’ll always be able to find the link. The study is by Nagappan, Maximilien, Bhat and Williams and is entitled: Realizing quality improvement through test driven development: results and experiences of four industrial teams and is freely downloadable from Microsoft. The second MSN team had a defect density less than a quarter of Y but took 15% longer. TDD reduced bugs. Anyone got a link?

A interesting question that came up last week was how to convert workflows defined in C# to XAML. co worker of one of the attendees of the Essential Windows Workflow Foundation 4 course had been experiencing a lot of problems with the workflow designer and decided to create their workflows in C# instead of using the designer to generate XAML. While these workflows run just fine you do lose the visual aspect of the designer, one of the benefits of workflow in the first place. Take the following workflow defined in C#. And now I can continue enhancing the XAML version and run that instead. Enjoy!

Ed Yourdon seems to have fallen off my radar so far this century. Last century I read a lot of his stuff and came to respect him as a man who knows what he’s talking about when it comes to IT and software development. If you haven’t heard of him, or don’t believe me just look at the list of books he’s written.) I recently discovered that he has a blog , and from there that he has recently been to the Agile 2010 conference. In fact it appears that the whole Agile thing has, to a large part, passed him by.

Modern Analyst has published my latest piece about Agile at the company level: Objective Agility - what does it take to be an Agile company? This is actually a bit of a taster for a presentation of with the same title I’ll be doing at the IIBA Business Analysis conference in a few weeks. And talking of businesses analysis. am running an ‘Essential Agile for Business Analysts’ at Skills Matter in a few weeks. Many of these themes come up in that course. believe there is still space available.

Neno Loje blogged about an important update that is available and should be installed by everyone that uses Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010. It enables Lab Management, but also installs all hot fixes that have been made available since 2010 became available. Neno’s FAQ says it all: Frequently asked questions. Should I install the update although I do not use Lab Management? Yes, it contains all TFS fixes that have been made since TFS 2010. Is this a Service Pack ? If I reinstall or add TFS components later, do I have to reapply this patch? More on: [link].