Paying Technical Debt: A Top-Down Approach @Scd16

Having developers do TDD and Agile places an enormous pressure on them, as TDD mindset is difficult to get accustomed to. Many people strongly dislike it when they first approach it like this, and there are better strategies to do that. Introducing some of the Agile practices (stories, sprints) in conjunction with BDD to an ongoing project enables developers to notice their mistakes early on and buys them on the testing side. After they get familiar with the approach, and feeling comfortable running test suites, it’s much easier to get the same people who initially were reluctant to TDD to embrace the bottom-up design emerging from unit tests.

Transcript

1. PAYING TECHNICAL DEBT:
   A TOP-DOWN APPROACH
   SHOPWARE COMMUNITY DAY

   MAY 2016
   image source
   GEORGIANA GLIGOR

   TEKKIE CONSULTING
   

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2. Paying Technical Debt: A Top-Down Approach @ Shopware Community Day, MAY 2016
   Georgiana Gligor
   ✓ Geek. Mother. Do-er.
   ✓ Crafting LAMP enterprise-
   level apps since 2003
   ✓ Architecture and DevOps
   consultant
   ✓ PHP Cluj Meetup Organizer
   

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3. Paying Technical Debt: A Top-Down Approach @ Shopware Community Day, MAY 2016
   via Twitter
   

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4. Paying Technical Debt: A Top-Down Approach @ Shopware Community Day, MAY 2016
   Agenda
   ✓ What is technical debt?
   ✓ Team roles
   ✓ Bottom-up approach
   ✓ Top-down approach
   ✓ Getting things done
   

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5. TECHNICAL
   DEBT
   

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6. Shipping code
   first time code
   is like going
   into debt.
   Ward Cunningham
   

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7. A mess is not
   technical debt.
   Uncle Bob
   

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8. Paying Technical Debt: A Top-Down Approach @ Shopware Community Day, MAY 2016
   Technical Debt Quadrant
   source: Martin Fowler
   Reckless Prudent
   Deliberate
   Inadvertent
   “We don’t have time
   for design”
   “We must ship now
   and deal
   with consequences”
   “Now we know
   how we
   should have done it”
   “What’s Layering?”
   

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9. Paying Technical Debt: A Top-Down Approach @ Shopware Community Day, MAY 2016
   ✓ July 31st 2012
   ✓ lost everything in 45 minutes
   ✓ SMARS routing algorithm
   ✓ Power Peg functionality
   Knight Capital Group
   

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10. Paying Technical Debt: A Top-Down Approach @ Shopware Community Day, MAY 2016
    ✓ June 4th 1996
    ✓ losses: > $370 million
    ✓ guidance system shut down after 37s
    ✓ reused inertial reference platform
    Ariane 5
    

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11. Paying Technical Debt: A Top-Down Approach @ Shopware Community Day, MAY 2016
    Team Roles
    Role Mentality Approach Level
    project manager trace system
    UX / UI usable & nice user
    software engineer build (sub)system
    tester break system
    DevOps maintain system
    

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12. Paying Technical Debt: A Top-Down Approach @ Shopware Community Day, MAY 2016
    Team Distribution
    developers
    UX / UI
    testers
    managers
    DevOps
    

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13. THE BOTTOM-UP
    APPROACH
    

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14. Paying Technical Debt: A Top-Down Approach @ Shopware Community Day, MAY 2016
    ✓ requires discipline
    ✓ tests cross the boundary of a single class
    ✓ collaborators: dummies / stubs / mocks
    ✓ dependencies can be slow
    ✓ tests become slow as they grow
    ✓ refactoring => removing unit tests
    TDD
    

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15. “REAL PROGRAMMERS
    DON’T TEST”
    

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16. My code works.
    I have a great track
    record.
    Why start now?
    Reason #1
    

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17. I am just making a
    small cosmetic
    change, nothing can
    go wrong.
    Reason #2
    

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18. Our client requested
    this functionality live
    by next Monday. We
    are short of time.
    Reason #3
    

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19. Client only pays for
    working software.
    Programmers are
    expensive, we can’t
    possibly sell this work.
    Reason #4
    

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20. We’re using V-Model
    approach. We’re not
    stepping on the
    dedicated QA team’s
    toes.
    Reason #5
    

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21. Paying Technical Debt: A Top-Down Approach @ Shopware Community Day, MAY 2016
    V-Model
    source: PA Consulting Group case study
    

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22. TESTING
    CONCEPTS
    

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23. Paying Technical Debt: A Top-Down Approach @ Shopware Community Day, MAY 2016
    ✓ Release acceptance testing (RAT) / smoke testing
    ✓ Functional acceptance simple testing (FAST)
    ✓ Compliance acceptance testing
    ✓ Deployment acceptance testing
    Acceptance Testing
    

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24. Paying Technical Debt: A Top-Down Approach @ Shopware Community Day, MAY 2016
    ✓ Task-oriented functional tests (TOFTs)
    ✓ Forced-error tests (FETs)
    ✓ Exploratory testing
    ✓ etc.
    Feature-Level Testing
    

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25. THE TOP-DOWN
    APPROACH
    

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26. Paying Technical Debt: A Top-Down Approach @ Shopware Community Day, MAY 2016
    ✓ each independent component is a
    different system
    ✓ kickstart makes a big difference
    Think System Level
    

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27. Paying Technical Debt: A Top-Down Approach @ Shopware Community Day, MAY 2016
    ✓ Where to start in the process
    ✓ What to test and what not to test
    ✓ How much to test in one go
    ✓ What to call the tests
    ✓ How to understand why a test fails
    Behaviour-Driven Development
    

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28. Paying Technical Debt: A Top-Down Approach @ Shopware Community Day, MAY 2016
    BDD Example
    

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29. Paying Technical Debt: A Top-Down Approach @ Shopware Community Day, MAY 2016
    BDD Example
    

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30. Paying Technical Debt: A Top-Down Approach @ Shopware Community Day, MAY 2016
    ✓ varies greatly, depending on project
    ▸ your product
    ▸ reseller
    ▸ outsource
    ✓ using BDD significantly lowers TCO
    Total Cost of Ownership
    

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31. Test automation is
    software
    development.
    Dale H. Emery3
    

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32. GETTING THINGS
    DONE
    

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33. Start teaching
    your developers
    testing today.
    Practice #1
    

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34. Rotate your
    developers to
    do testing.
    Practice #2
    

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35. Adopt
    systematic
    testing methods.
    Practice #3
    

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36. Paying Technical Debt: A Top-Down Approach @ Shopware Community Day, MAY 2016
    Systematic Testing Methods
    component
    KPRWVU
    QWVRWVU
    UKFGGHHGEVU
    

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37. Fixture-based
    development.
    Practice #4
    

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38. Paying Technical Debt: A Top-Down Approach @ Shopware Community Day, MAY 2016
    Fixtures
    

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39. Automate scenario
    runs to address
    regression.
    Practice #5
    

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40. Paying Technical Debt: A Top-Down Approach @ Shopware Community Day, MAY 2016
    1. Conway, Melvin E. (1968). How Do Committees Invent?
    2. Cook, Richard I. (1998). How Complex Systems Fail
    3. Emery, Dale H. (2009). Writing Maintainable Automated
    Acceptance Tests
    4. Nguyen, Hung Q., Bob Johnson, and Michael Hackett
    (2003). Testing Applications on the Web: Test Planning for
    Mobile and Internet-Based Systems. Wiley Publishing Inc.
    ISBN: 0-471-20100-6
    5. North, Dan (2006). Introducing BDD
    Recommended Reading (1)
    

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41. Paying Technical Debt: A Top-Down Approach @ Shopware Community Day, MAY 2016
    6. Fowler, Martin (2009). Technical Debt Quadrant
    7. Gleick, James (1996). A Bug and A Crash
    8. Martin, Robert Cecil (2009). A Mess is not a Technical Debt
    9. Securities and Exchange Commission (2013).
    Administrative Proceeding File No. 3-15570
    10. Seven, Doug (2014). Knightmare, A DevOps Cautionary Tale
    11. PA Consulting Group (2011). Major UK water utility -
    Architecture and design assurance
    Recommended Reading (2)
    

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42. THANK YOU
    Georgiana Gligor
    @gbtekkie
    

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