Noel Rappin Writes Here

Book Status The initial beta release of Rails Test Prescriptions has been pushed back at least a week. It’s not anybody’s fault, just a traffic jam of books all coming into the system at the same time (including, I assume, the new iPad book). Hoping to see a cover and other details in time for next week. In the meantime, I’m continuing on as if we’re in the beta, which means I’m now revisiting the section on integration testing.

Actual public beta of Rails Test Prescriptions is finally getting close enough that I can see it. Unless I forgot something from my conversation earlier today, there are three things that need to be done before the book can be put on beta-sale: Both myself and Colleen, the editor, need to do one more read through the chapters in question to make sure there aren’t any gaping things missing.

iPad, iPad, iPad. Five Random Thoughts Given that Apple’s business model for most of the past 30 years has been not to compete on feature lists, but rather to pare down features in the name of user experience, that a tech analyst would at least pause before proclaiming the iPad to be a failure because it doesn’t have feature X. I don’t think the iWork stuff got enough attention.

The book went out for 50% technical review this week, covering the first nine chapters, which is about 160 pages. With the warning that I don’t actually decide any of this stuff, it seems like if the reviews are basically positive, then the book will head into beta purchase while I work on the rest of it. I doubt that will happen in February, but I’m really hopeful for sometime in March.

Here’s where we are in the publishing cycle of Rails Test Prescriptions: The book went through a major hurdle in December when it went through “Publisher review”, where three chapters were submitted to Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt for review. Dave and Andy, thankfully, said mostly good things, asked for a few revisions, and caught some relatively minor technical issues. (I suspect the major technical issues are in a later chapter…).

And now some testimony from Brother Nicely-Nicely Johnson, I mean, James Turner, from O’Reilly Radar: The Cult of Scrum: If Agile is the teachings of Jesus, Scrum is every abuse ever perpetrated in his name. In many ways, Scrum as practiced in most companies today is the antithesis of Agile, a heavy, dogmatic methodology that blindly follows a checklist of “best practices” that some consultant convinced the management to follow.

In true blog form, a declarative statement: Hear ye, hear ye! Any so-called Agile team that ever tries to translate “points” into actual units of time is presumed dysfunctional until proven otherwise. You’ve done it, I’ve done it, we’ve all done it. Doesn’t make it a good idea. In the spirit of my last post, allow me to over-explain. A typical Agile project handles estimation by splitting the project up into smallish user stories and assigning each one a point value, typically between one and five, though different teams have different standards.

Having shifted from editing on the book back to actual writing for a few new chapters, I’m back to obsessing about examples. (The book, of course, is Rails Test Prescriptions coming soonish to a bookstore or computer screen near you. Tell your friends.) I feel like I spend way more time obsessing over whether I’m picking good examples than the question actually merits. Or to put that another way, I’m pretty sure there’s a difference between a good example and a bad example, I’m much less sure there’s a difference between a great example and a good example.

Here’s a little RSpec design question. As I’ve probably mentioned in various spots, I don’t naturally take to the RSpec massively-mocked style of testing. However, I’m currently on a Rails project that is using that style – unit tests don’t touch the database, functional tests don’t touch the models. It seems to be working for them, they certainly seem to have stuck with it over the course of this rather complex application.

Pragmatic wants November to be PragProWriMon, something of the non-fiction alternative to NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. It’s a great idea. The best way to actually write anything is to get in the habit of sitting down and typing. Conversely, the best way to stop writing something is to break the habit, even for a couple of days. There are other places to go for inspiration on sitting down and writing (I’m kind of partial to Merlin Mann’s epic about making the clackity noise).