No Fluff Just Suff

I spent the weekend along with a bunch of guys from our team at the NFJS show in Green Bay: www.nofluffjuststuff.com. Overall I think the conference was very good. One of the big things that I took from the Conference is the idea of having a retrospective after you finish an iteration. One way to view this weekend was as an iteration of learning, so I'm gonna have my own little retrospective here.

Ok this got really long as I was writting it so I have broken it into several smaller enteries. And just a quick summary here.

10 Best things from the weekend:

1. Integration Tests are equally as important as unit tests
   
2. Peer Code review should be done before EVERY Checkin
3. Peer code review does NOT have to be done with somebody that is an expert in the code you are working on
4. DDT - Defect Driven Testing ( if there is a bug write a test before fixing the bug )
5. Groovy is well groovy
6. Meta Programming is Extreamly Powerful
7. You can manipulate Java objects at runtime from groovy using Meta Programming
8. Code Coverage should include all Unit and Integration/Functional Tests and System testing
9. Work in smaller iterations ( typically 1-4 weeks )
10. Within iterations break tasks down into things that can be completed in 0.5-3 days

The biggest thing that could impove me as a developer is...
Instead of simply writting unit tests I need to take a bigger picutre and make sure I write good integration tests as well.

The biggest thing that could impove the team..
Doing peer code reviews before every check in would help both the reviewer and the reviewe.

Update:
Here are links for the 3 detail entries...
NFJS ( Groovy )
NFJS(Mocks, CI, and other tools of Agile Folks)
NFSJ(TDD, DDT, and other practices of Agile Folk)