Skated in Victoria Park, lunch at The Crown, Matrix Reloaded and a pizza at Strada. Top day ;) We skated in Victoria Park this morning. It was pretty good. Lots of wide, quiet, paths with reasonable tarmac and nowhere near as busy as Hyde Park. Practising crossover turns, skating fast, balancing on one foot and looking for kerbs to jump off of… Stopped for lunch at The Crown. Food was good, if a little pricey.

I used to have pretty severe problems with my shoulders and right arm. Mostly mouse related; I think. When it was really bad I had a lot of shiatsu, which worked well and helped remove the residual tension in my shoulder. Now I seem to be able to keep it all at bay by drinking lots of water… I don’t actually think it’s the drinking itself that helps. It’s all the movement that goes with it.

Ok, the blog looks crap in IE 5.x I’ve seen the stuff about hacking around the css bugs in IE but I’m not clever enough to hack the css sheet that I have to do that. If anyone knows what I need to do to fix it so that it looks nicer in IE 5.x, please let me know.

Just watched “28 Days Later” on dvd. Very cool. Very British - very non-Hollywood. Scary film. The best bit? Seeing the London streets so empty. If you live or work anywhere near London you’d know how impossible those empty street scenes were :)

Today -1 Week: Them: So, here’s what we need by 9th June. Us: Ok, we can just about do that… Today: Them: Oh, add all of these things and put most of the things we asked for last week way down the list. Can you still do it by the 9th? Perhaps. Right now we don’t know if we can still hit the 9th. The new requirements have added a vast element of uncertainty.

Another week another release. Well, almost. The plan was to release today. The plan ignored the fact that most of the team are at a wedding this weekend and nobody was around today and nobody’s around on Monday… The latest release included some new functionality and a lot of refactoring. Given the amount of code that had been ’touched’ I recommended a longer test phase than we usually planned, i.e. more than 1 day.

As promised this week’s lesson had us doing crossover turns and the start of skating backwards. Crossover turns aren’t actually that hard. Once you get used the the idea of doing it. Just lift the outside leg up during the turn, move your weight in a bit, wait until you start to fall over and then step across yourself onto the other foot. Note this is just what it feels like, it’s probably completely wrong ;) It all felt far easier if I rolled my turning skate onto the inside edge.

Now that the refactoring project has tests it’s worth having a daily build so that it’s easy to spot if someone checks something in that breaks a test. I spent 30 mins or so first thing this morning writing a script that pulls all the source from CVS and builds the test harnesses in debug and release mode and runs them. This now runs daily on my machine. Most of the day was spent moving as many classes as possible into the library.

Kent Beck demonstrates the testing side of XP by separating it out into its own simple methodology. Test-Driven Development is exactly what it says it is. The entire design and development effort is driven by the tests that you write and you’re encouraged to write those tests first… Parts one and two contain worked examples of Test-Driven Development. Some will probably say that they’re too simple, but I’ve found that even the most complex domain usually ends up as relatively simple code if you develop in this way.

The refactoring project reached an exciting new stage on Friday. We were finally able to refactor some code to the point where several classes could be extracted from the application project and built in a library that the application then linked to. This required that we reduce the coupling of the classes and increase the cohesion. Once these classes were extracted we were able to set up a test harness project and write our first test case!