Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Tracer bullet software development


The principle behind its name:
by tracing your bullet, you can see where it's going so that you can adjust your aim to the target better.

The steps:
• define the highlevel subsystem objects (e.g. UI client, database access layer), by all the developers in the team instead of just an architect
• the developers define the interfaces of these objects & how they communicate (e.g. via webservice)
• implement the interfaces with mock objects, integrate early (proof of concepts how the subsystem communicate)
• implement tests with user's scenarios & canned data
• implement the functional code (start with the hardest problems/new technology first), only accept working code (which not breaking the test)
• refactor & refine

SOA & spring lend themselves to this method. In the wsdl-first SOA development you inherently start with defining the interfaces (via wsdl contracts). In Spring you can start with defining the interfaces and later bring in the implementations using dependency injections.

The benefits:
• teams/developers can work in parallel
• the whole teams/developers understand the architecture
• promote communications between teams/developers
• doesn't waste time with unproven low level designs
• you can give demos to the customer earlier to get earlier feedbacks
• the application management (technisch applicatiebeheer) can test the integration between subsystems earlier thus reducing the risk that the project will be late in the product acceptation/deployment phase or that the developer need to redesign and reimplement parts of the systems.
• the QA team can test the performance & security earlier for earlier feedbacks

Source: Steve's blogs http://soa-java.blogspot.com/

Any comments are welcome :)



Source: Steve's blog http://soa-java.blogspot.com

References:
The Pragmatic Programmer


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