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Not much time has passed since we blogged about attending a video presentation on clean code by Uncle Bob (Robert Martin), and we already had the pleasure of participating in another one in the series. This time the subject was Test-Driven Development (TDD).

After seeing the first video, I was already accustomed to the rather eccentric style of Uncle Bob and found his use of props and changing backgrounds entertaining rather than distracting. The new presentation had the form of a conversation between Uncle Bob and Mr. Spock, who is known for his purely logical worldview.

Uncle Bob explained how applying TDD improves the quality of source code, especially in large scale projects. He pointed out a common problem encountered by programmers working with complex systems, who are often afraid of making changes in existing (working) code, because it might cause unexpected problems. As a result, lower quality code is kept in the system.

Implementation of rigorous testing procedures mitigates these fears, since it allows the programmer who is making changes to the code to immediately run the tests and discover any problems. However, this only works when the programmer can fully trust the test suite. To make sure the tests are in fact trustworthy, the following three rules must be met:

1. Any production code that is to be written must fix an existing, failing test.
2. Every test must correspond to a specific missing feature or bug in the system, and must only check the minimal set of conditions sufficient for it to fail.
3. It is forbidden to write more production code than is sufficient to make one failing test pass.

The advantages of the strict TDD approach are indisputable – in large projects, it allows programmers to work more effectively, it makes quality control much easier, and (as was already said) it eliminates the dangers of making changes in “old” code.

I won’t spoil the ending of the presentation and tell you whether Uncle Bob succeeded in convincing Mr. Spock of his perspective. He definitely did encourage me to try implementing TDD in a formal manner – I hope I will get a chance to do that in one of the projects that I’ll be working on in a near future.

We published a new project on our GitHub profile – a plugin for the Highcharts charting library, called Legend Highlighter, which adds the ability to highlight a specific data series on a chart.

The plugin was created as part of our work on a project that uses Highcharts, and it was initially supposed to only add a simple “slice out” effect for pie charts. We then extended it to support other chart types, making it more flexible and useful. We created a page with a few examples of how the plugin works with various charts (based on the demo charts provided by Highcharts) – go ahead and take a look.

The source code of the plugin is published under the MIT license, so feel free to use it any way you like, and fork it. We’re also looking forward to your feedback.

Today is Sunday, so technically we’re enjoying the weekend, but since it’s also the 15th day of the month, we’re bound by tradition to do the monthly donations. This month, Krzysiek Skarbek had the honor of selecting the open source project and organization to support.

The first donation that we’re making this month is to Nginx, the BSD-licensed HTTP server which is famous for its scalability and performance. We appreciate Nginx’s qualities and often use it in our work with web projects, and have used it as a deployment server for a number of our client’s applications. We send our thanks and congratulations to the developers of Nginx, especially to Igor Sysoev, the original creator.

We are also supporting the “KOTYlion” Foundation in Lodz, who helps abandoned and stray cats. We send our best wishes to the Foundation’s crew and volunteers, and of course to all of the cats under their care!

In the spirit of expanding our knowledge on both the basic and advanced programming concepts, most of our Lodz-based team members have attended a video presentation on how to write code in clean fashion, delivered by the one and only Uncle Bob. The event was organized by the Lodz Java User Group and took place at the Department of Microelectronics and Computer Science, at Lodz University of Technology. It was sponsored by Rule Financial.

Robert Martin, known as Uncle Bob, is a recognized American consultant and author. His book “Clean Code” is a classic and recommended reading for anyone who develops and maintains source code. Uncle Bob founded The Clean Coders, a company that creates educational videos for programmers (code-casts). The videos are made available under community license and can be shown to a group of up to 50 people outside of business hours (and only one time).

Seeing the presentation was a rewarding experience for all of us. Once in a while, it’s valuable to listen to a senior guy wielding a samurai sword and ordering you to stick to the proper coding standards!

One of the things we’ve been told is that every comment in the source code is a personal failure of the programmer, because it proves that he didn’t manage to express the purpose of the code fragment with the programming language itself.

Uncle Bob underlined the importance of keeping your source files small, in the range of 60 to 200 lines of code. This was supported by real-life statistics coming from many mature projects.

The presentation also explained the difference between a class and a data structure, as well as how to use both concepts in the design of solid business solutions.

My personal favorite was the well-deserved ridicule of getter and setter methods. I always found the concept somewhat disturbing, especially when it was preached as gospel by college instructors. In my opinion, having private variables and then accessing them with methods like getFoo() demonstrates a lack of understanding of the basics of object-oriented programming.

Another enlightening observation was that a database does not store real objects coming from the business world, but merely their representation in the form of a data structure (with columns acting as public members of the structure).

The video was entertaining and filled with funny moments, but personally I found some of Uncle’s props a bit distracting (such as the magic wand). Anyway, overall it was a very good presentation.

Since we all liked it, and more presentations in the series are in need of sponsors, it’s highely likely that our company will act as one in the near future (and we’ll be sure to announce it here on our blog).

It’s donations time again! By tradition, in the middle of the month we’re making donations to open source projects and charity organizations. This month’s beneficiaries have been chosen by Piotr.

Our first donation goes to the Apache Software Foundation, which supports numerous open source projects. The Foundation was formed in 1999, and their flagship project is the Apache HTTP server, world’s most popular web server since 1996. We have been using the Apache server for years in our work, both as a crucial development tool, and as a platform on which our clients’ applications are launched. We also often use other software that is developed thanks to the support of the Apache Software Foundation, such as Lucene, Cordova, or JMeter. Thank you, ASF guys!

We are also sending a donation to the ”IRMA” Foundation, located in Poznan, which is devoted to promoting the idea of the use of search and rescue dogs. The Foundation is named after Crumstone Irma, a German Shepherd that helped rescue people trapped under collapsed buildings after the bombings of London during World War II. The Foundation was formed recently (it’s less than a year old), but has some dedicated people on board and is growing quickly. “Irma”, we wish you all the best in your efforts!

Today’s the day when we do our traditional monthly donations. The organizations to support this month have been selected by Karol Janyst.

We usually support open source projects, but this time we’re making a kind of an exception by donating to the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the organization that operates Wikipedia (they also run the open source project MediaWiki, so maybe it’s not that much of an exception after all). Over the years of our work, there have been countless occasions when Wikipedia has proven to be an invaluable source of information, so this donation is well deserved. Thank you, Wikimedia Foundation, and all the Wikipedians, for your hard work!

The second organization that receives our donation this month is the R² Foundation, which is a motorcycle emergency response team run by a group of volunteers. Karol’s choice was heavily influenced by the fact that he is an avid motorcycle rider himself. The R² team has been operating since 2003, and if you’d like to see them in action, there’s an interesting video on YouTube which showcases some of their work and training. R² volunteers, we wish you all the best!