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Author: Dave Farinelli

  • The Benefits of Test-driven Development

    The Benefits of Test-driven Development

    It sounds like an oxymoron: Create test cases before coding. In the process of writing and using test cases before writing functionality, a developer can produce higher-quality software. That is the concept behind test-driven development (TDD), and it works.

    TDD Snapshot

    TDD has been around since at least 1999, and it is part of the emerging test-first approach to development associated with extreme programming. In 2003, American software developer Kent Beck “rediscovered” TDD and applied it as a way to create simple designs and inspire developer confidence. Fast forward to today’s agile development world, TDD is a software development process using a very short feedback loop in which developers do the following:

    1. Create a test that will fail immediately.
    2. Write the necessary code to pass the test as quickly as possible.
    3. Refactor the code written in step two, using the created test as a reference.

    TDD Benefits

    So why might a long-in-the-tooth software development approach have tangible benefits in an agile development world? Because put in its simplest terms, TDD is a way to develop highly usable software.

    Following the TDD process, a developer must focus on the test cases before actually coding anything. That meansa developer is thinking more about the use of the software and the design of user interfaces to achieve that. As a result, the developer is more interested in the interface than in the implementation—and that leads to more usable software.

    There are several other tangible benefits for taking a TDD approach, including:

    • Creating a metric for the code quality that can be easy and quick.
    • Allowing for a quick visualization to determine if the code base has any functional issues.
    • Living documentation of functionality with new code written.
    • Allowing for safe refactors of code, whether based on attempts to improve code quality or a changed requirement.

    That final point is worth dwelling on for a moment. The TDD approach requires that the evolving code base is cleaned up frequently so that new tests and code are easy to introduce. That usually means that code moves from its current place to where it more logically belongs in the software. That has the effect of reducing any extraneous duplication of code and enforces a strong discipline around objects, classes, modules, etc. In this way, the overall maintainability of the software increases incrementally.

    The improvement in readability and maintainability will pay huge dividends during the expected life cycle of the software. Following a TDD methodology requires developers to focus on writing smaller units of testable code. By following the TDD methodology, this leads to more modularized, flexible and extensible software.

    Where Can TDD Fit?

    A TDD approach is appropriate for both new greenfield software and legacy systems. For a development team that has to deal with existing legacy software, the key is to start small and begin with working on bug fixes. A good practice is that for each bug reported, create a test that addresses the broken bug and then fix the functionality. After several iterations of this, the development team has created a repeatable working test to address bug fixes. When applying this methodology to new software applications, make a point of understanding the testing tools used for the technology stack.

    For example, when working in an Angular application that generally uses the Jasmine testing framework for unit testing, and when using the Angular CLI for creation, unit tests are created alongside modules of code. Using a TDD methodology, the approach would be to:

    1. Determine a portion of the functionality to be created with this component.
    2. Create a unit test that will fail immediately targeting this portion of functionality.
    3. Run the test runner to confirm the failing test (it may be useful here to leave the test runner on to run after each source file save, which speeds the process).
    4. Write code in the Angular component that will make the written test pass.
    5. Make any refactoring changes for the Angular component after confirming passing, using the test as a guideline to ensure code refactoring does not break functionality.

    Measuring Testability with Code Coverage

    Another essential consideration when improving testability in code is to use a code coverage tool. Code coverage is a metric to show the percentage of code that has a unit test written for it. Angular applications use Istanbul to calculate code coverage through the application. Running a single run of code coverage in an existing project gives the following output:

    The output provided by Istanbul gives a metric on the overall test coverage and the areas of code that need improvement in testing. Code coverage can be useful in a few ways:

    • Provides an idea of the overall testability, allowing for a threshold to ensure the total software testability does not drop past a certain point.
    • Identifies areas in the code base with poor testing, making them opportunities for refactoring.

    However, as effective as code coverage can sound, it’s important to understand that it’s just a metric. Writing good unit tests is a matter of following what the code will do, and metrics such as these should not drive significant decisions.

    Considerations When Using TDD

    It’s important to note that TDD does not solve all problems. There are many different types of testing required to create a fully comprehensive testing strategy, including acceptance testing. In TDD, the focus is on a single unit of code at a time. A sophisticated software application may have many thousands of units of code and their corresponding tests. That’s why it’s critical to make sure that testing quality stays high when following the TDD methodology. Tests cannot become something bypassed in the pursuit of more functionality or expediency. Avoiding testing generates the risk of test creation becoming a hindrance for developers.

    For example, ignoring failing tests makes it difficult to determine the actual state of the application. It’s also important to have buy-in for a TDD approach form all the teams involved in the effort. Buy-in is particularly true on the business side. Time must be spent up front discussing the nature and benefits of a TDD approach, and the belief that using TDD will improve the resulting software. Otherwise, business management sees writing tests as an activity that doesn’t contribute to the bottom line.

    Conclusion

    TDD emphasizes the importance of an effective and sustainable testing approach. TDD also contributes directly to the overall quality of software. It’s a truism for small or large system development that often goes missing in the day-to-day hustle to get new functionality into production. Quality software gets built when there’s an acknowledgment that quality test code should receive the same amount of attention and resources as quality production code, as they are equally essential in development.

    — Dave Farinelli

  • Living in a DevOps World, Part 2

    Living in a DevOps World, Part 2

    Part one of this article focused on some of the more behind-the-scenes benefits of an Agile DevOps approach. In part two the focus turns to some of the other traditional problems that a well-executed DevOps approach can address, and how doing so can benefit an organization in more ways than just a technical perspective.

    By way of quick review, DevOps was born out of the Lean and Agile software development methodologies when it became clear that, while those methodologies did indeed speed up the development process, a bottleneck still occurred when push came to shove and new code had to be moved to quality assurance and production environments.

    DevOps was created to more seamlessly connect the development and operations processes, making code migration, testing and promotion to production a more efficient process. To accomplish this, the DevOps approach had to find solutions for some of the issues that caused operational delays, and create new ways to organize, implement and continuously optimize the operations process.

    Overproduction/Overprocessing

    For those who have been in development and/or operations for any length of time, it quickly becomes clear that there is a multitude of operational safety checks that serve to protect a production environment. While that is vitally important, it was also clear that there had grown an “over” problem around many operational procedures, and in many cases that manifested itself in the development process. That includes overproduction, when making or requesting more than was needed from requirements and/or operations perspective to clear arbitrary operations process hurdles.

    Alternatively, overprocessing, when development and operations resources do more work (as opposed to just enough, as Lean and Agile would suggest) than required to smooth the transition of code and functions from development to operations. This created waste regarding time, resources and budgets that were not proportional to the benefits derived from following the operations process.

    Motion and Transportation

    Similarly, DevOps also sought to solve the operational problems of both motion and transportation. That is, the amount of excess work required to deliver new code to meet the operational requirements for code migration. The friction caused by such requirements slowed the motion and momentum of the development process. The same is true of transportation, or the difficulty in moving code between environments such as testing, quality assurance and production.

    In both cases, development and project momentum was sacrificed for what often turned out to be a series of artificial hurdles that had long since become less effective or even obsolete parts of the operations process.

    Correction and Inventory

    In most instances, all of the above resulted in the final maladies of the pre-DevOps development and operational ways. The first was the number of in-flight corrections required when timelines were squeezed, and the rush was on to get to production. Unfortunately, this went hand in hand with the ultimate problem of good code being sacrificed for expedient delivery, often resulting in inadequate functionality, system outages and, in the end, lost market opportunity and revenue.

    3 Keys to DevOps Success

    Any successful DevOps implementation must address three critical factors in this order: culture, organization and tools.

    Culture

    It’s critically important to connect an organization’s values to the DevOps process. Valuing quality, timeliness and organizational alignment of goals and objectives is the first step toward DevOps success. Such cultural values translate directly into a DevOps organization.

    Providing empowerment and accountability to DevOps team members helps to build ownership among the team, and trust from their customers in the rest of the organization. It also helps to provide a physical environment that fosters collaboration, teamwork and continued learning. Co-working spaces and collaboration tools such as Slack are a good start. Attending external conferences to broaden perspectives and to bring new ideas back to the team is often beneficial. From there, brown bag lunch sessions where ideas and experiences can be shared, frequent post-mortems on implementations to hone best practices, and even internal mini-conferences where several departments come together for a day to discuss DevOps practices are all effective ways to build a strong DevOps culture.

    Organization

    Any good DevOps organization is two-sided; that is it has to work from the top down and from the bottom up at the same time.

    The top-down part is in the ability to “see the system” from a macro level, allowing for process understanding and insights from a business workflow perspective. This helps to identify the pain points and bottlenecks in the current process that can be optimized through the DevOps process.

    Once that’s accomplished, the bottom-up work begins. Identifying things such as inconsistencies in code deployment environments that cause delivery issues, elimination of manual and custom built deployment processes and quarantining inefficient and poorly written code until it can be redone or eliminated are all part of optimizing the time, quality, resources and success factors for deploying production systems on schedule. It’s also important here to continually audit the current processes with an eye toward eliminating the processes that are no longer required or useful but have been kept in place out of the fear of  “breaking something we don’t understand.” If nobody understands it, then it shouldn’t be in production software.

    Automation Tools

    The final factor for DevOps success is to have the right toolset.

    Communication: Any DevOps team requires the ability to quickly and directly communicate with other team members sans meetings. For this purpose, tools such Slack (real-time chat), Skype (video chat), and Confluence (for storing persistent information) are pretty good options.

    Planning, Monitoring & Consistency: For the team’s planning needs, a tool such as Trello that can provide Kanban board functionality is worth a look. For issue tracking and monitoring of any system’s overall health, tools such as Jira and NewRelic respectively provide some good functionality. Likewise, consistency is vital in a DevOps world, and using automation to ensure that all systems are configured as desired across different environments is a crucial best practice. For this, a tool such as Ansible is worth a review.

    Integration & Deployment: For continuous integration of systems in development and as a way to tighten the feedback loop for developers to determine if the central build used for deployment to production is working as intended, the Jenkins toolset might be a good fit. And finally, when it comes making any deployment process as painless as possible, a tool such as Docker that can handle created containers for an application that includes all dependencies, reducing the complexity of deployment to multiple environments, is a solid way to go.

    The point of all of this is to create an environment—culturally, technically and physically—where DevOps can succeed, grow and thrive. Organizations that can create an effective and efficient DevOps environment have also created a competitive advantage for themselves.

    — Dave Farinelli

  • Living in a DevOps World (Part 1)

    Living in a DevOps World (Part 1)

    The concept of DevOps has grown and evolved into a conceptual and working model for more effective and efficient software development and implementation. That said, there are some differences of opinion on the real-world value of any DevOps approach to date, and on the best way to create and implement a real-world DevOps environment. This two-part article will focus on what an agile DevOps approach is meant to address, and what it is not meant to address.

    DevOps sits at the nexus of three essential business technology functions: software development, quality assurance and operations. A short and concise definition of DevOps proposed in 2015 seems as appropriate as any:

    DevOps is a set of practices intended to reduce the time between committing a change to a system and the change being placed into regular production while ensuring high quality.

    The definition was suggested in the book, “DevOps: A Software Architect’s Perspective,” and the authors have hit upon the essence of the practice. The key, of course, is how to put that concept into practice.

    Perhaps the first step on the journey to effective DevOps is the recognition that the concept is the result of the rise of the Lean and Agile software development methodologies. Those methodologies, among other things, emphasize the following:

    • A focus on customer value.
    • The elimination of waste.
    • Reduced cycle time (accomplishing work faster, releasing faster).
    • Shared learning.
    • Avoiding batching (don’t do things until required).
    • Theory of constraints (break things up, focus on individual issues).
    • Continuous integration, testing and delivery.
    • Faster time to market.

    DevOps in Practice

    Adherence to the principles above meant that something had to be invented to accomplish them and that something was DevOps. Over time, an effective DevOps practice should address any number of business technology pain points. The following short list of those pain points and the DevOps response should prove instructive.

    System Downtime

    The developers’ curse since systems were developed, system outages are inevitable as long as systems are designed, tested and implemented—even with increased automation—by imperfect beings. DevOps acknowledges that by changing the focus from trying to create applications that never fail to designing systems that can recover quickly, thus decreasing aggregate systems outage time over the life cycle of any application or system.

    Stagnation

    This was a staple of traditional systems development and is most closely associated with the waterfall methodology for systems development. After requirements were created, the development team would be locked away for weeks, months or, in some cases, years before emerging with “fully” working software that inevitably no longer satisfied rapidly evolving business requirements. DevOps is designed to fit hand-in-glove with the Agile practice of short windows of incremental changes instead of long release cycles, putting working software in the hands of customers as quickly as possible.

    Team Conflict

    Having been borne from the cultural combination of Agile and Lean, DevOps has taken on the problem of functional silos that are often erected between development, operations and the business customers. It follows the methodological approaches of collaboration and teamwork first to understand what others know and to leverage the best of it to solve business problems more rapidly. There is also a cultural bent toward experimentation, continual learning and constant improvement. This leads to blameless post-mortems, where instead of finger pointing when something goes wrong there is collaborative discussion and learning to correct and prevent the problem from occurring again.

    Knowledge Silos

    Functional silos have led to compartmentalized knowledge. If the old game was that knowledge is power, the new game in the DevOps world is that knowledge is freely exchanged as an enabler to solving business problems. DevOps addresses the problem of information being lost in translation between the development and operations functions by eliminating the functional barricades and making knowledge sharing the highest form of collaboration.

    Inefficiency

    Waiting for things to happen used to be a standard operating procedure in the pre-DevOps world. Project plans were created and managed to account for the time it might take for new code to be moved into a testing, quality or even production environment. This was a momentum killer for projects and at times a morale killer for developers waiting to see what changes they might need to make to their code set. The combined Agile and DevOps approach has rewritten the traditional approach to code migration, smoothing and eliminating wait times so that projects flow more seamlessly from start to finish. It also has the benefit of keeping business resources—testers, approvers, etc.—more engaged as a result of a constant flow of new functions and features to test and use. And lest this be viewed as simply a way to keep the technical stuff moving along, it’s important to remember that there is a financial aspect to this as well. Reducing speed to market with new functionality, reducing or eliminating idle hands—be they technical or business—and delighting customers with a steady stream of enhancements and features all go directly to an organization’s top and bottom lines.

    That, after all, is in many ways what the DevOps approach is all about. All of these critical areas become the means to accomplish it. Part two of this article will focus on some more of the benefits of a DevOps approach, and how to achieve them.

    — Dave Farinelli