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giladmanor.com
giladmanor@yahoo.com
Bazooka developer
Written by Gilad ManorPosted on June 14
th
, 2009 ongiladmanor.comIt is so told, that there should come a time for everydeveloper, when he be faced with the challenge of codingin the sky. A situation like this happens when a client isfaced with a critical problem and needs an immediatesolution. The solution provider decides to give it a go,sends out a repair man, for a fast, cowboy style solution,and cashes in the check.
When my turn came, I was handed the assignment along with the flight tickets anda brief rundown of the functionality I had to deliver. The functionality took about anhour for him to describe. This kind of positive thinking often reminds me of the ‘Bazooka Joe’ bubblegumfortune, telling me that by the age of 21 I would probably land on the moon.Keeping that same positive thinking in mind, I realized it would be a niceopportunity for setting my agile development skills to the test. I preach agility allthe time. I preach it to my colleges and to my developers. I even preach it to myboss. There was no way I was about to turn ‘cowboy’ on all that. The entire time frame for this task was less than a standard agile heart beat, but Istuck with the principles, and used them to guide me.
My first task was to deliver functionality.
So I set to inquire whatever Icould about the requirements. There was the way my boss envisioned it and therewere some correspondence with the customer that preceded the request. I sweptthrough the mail exchanges, to find out how the customer wanted it to work andhow it ought to be fitted in the surrounding landscape of the other systems. I cameout with a detailed feature list, reflecting the functionality requirements, an outlinesketch of the interfaces and a high level cubistic design with a short list of would beobstacles (i.e. outstanding issues yet to be resolved).Meeting the bare minimum to enable testability: I wrote a mock up interface invoker(two actually, that know how to talk to each other in a session like manner). Just like
 
in the real world, my module was going to be ‘stuck’ right in between the twomockups, doing so I could have a convenient testing envelope where I can graduallygrow my functionality.I felt I was ready for some hard core coding.
Fortune: you will not get much sleep the next few nights.
I developed in short cycles.
I used my short list of suspected pickles
 
to definethe steps for development. After coding a new solution that was suppose to addressa particular issue, I ran the module against the testing facilities, with all thescenarios I had so far, and a new scenario that would test the solution. This got methrough debugging and I made sure that I was not disrupting previously developedfeatures (i.e. regression testing).I know, I know, I was sprinting or whatever. In any case it kept me focused on mygoals and constantly in check with working functionality.I sprinted at the office, I sprinted at home, I sprinted at night, in the airport and onthe airplane.It so happened that by the time I got to the site, I was far from done, but I did havea prototype that was solid enough and being as it was, I had it installed on one of the development environment there.
I made use of the customer 
. The customer in this case was a respectableAmerican corporate. I met there with the IT team that held everything together.Right at the beginning, they brought into my attention that they had four sets of environments. This was an important point to note since there were differences inapplication versions between them. The version differences meant that every time Igot environmentally promoted, I had to adjust to the changes in protocol andbehavior.
Fortune: an overnight success is the result of years of preparations
At this stage, I could have my testing cycles run up against real applications and notthe mockup applications I prepared myself. The people from the IT team helped melearn about the extreme scenarios and together we were able to devise ameticulous testing plan. Together we defined the scope for load testing.During the working hours, I ran tests on the various environments that wereavailable and spent the nights at the hotel for code fixing and optimization. This wasnot an easy time for me. By the end of the first week we have conducted a fewcycles of testing and amendment, and we were already deep into the load testing.
Fortune: the love you give is equal to the love you get
I was also able to cater for some extra requests for changes. These were minormodifications that had to do with logging and configuration options, but it made
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