DDevelopment & Design

Agile Skills Project at my company

Unfulfilled programmers Erich Fromm, a famous humanist, philosopher and psychologist strongly believed that people are basically good. If he was right, then either our society is a mind-breaking dystopia or we have a great misfortune of working i… Unfulfilled programmers Erich Fromm, a famous humanist, philosopher and psychologist strongly believed that people are basically good. If he was right, then either our society is a mind-breaking dystopia or we have a great misfortune of working i…

Unfulfilled programmers Erich Fromm, a famous humanist, philosopher and psychologist strongly believed that people are basically good. If he was right, then either our society is a mind-breaking dystopia or we have a great misfortune of working in a field that burns people out, because many IT people I know are more like Al Bundy than anyone else. Why is being a couch potato something wrong? Happiness can be achieved in many different ways, but not by passive pleasures. One way of pursuing happiness is by self realization and while self realization can happen in any activity, it’s makes perfect sense to have it at work, where you spend one third of your life time anyway. But many developers I know, consider work as something boring at best, dreadful at worst. True, programming can be awful, when you have to dig deep into a terrible code base without any perspective for a change, but IT is vast and you can always find something interesting, and once you learn it, you will find a way to make money on it, either by changing position inside your company or changing your employer altogether. Yet most unhappy IT professionals don’t do anything to change their situation. The main reason for that is, because it requires a lot of learning, and learning at home is not the most beloved activity for a couch potato. So why are developers turning into couch potatoes in the first place? Why the last thing a typical developer will do back home is learning and polishing his skills? There are plenty of reasons for that. The three main roots of an IT couch potato First, our work is tiresome. Nearly every job offer you can find mentions “able to work under pressure” and “flexible long working hours” in the requirements. This translates directly to the “burn-out” phenomenon. Second, the technological landscape is changing overwhelming fast. Unless you work for a slowly adapting institution like a bank, your skills will be outdated in a few years time. Sure the deceased Sun, god help us, granted Java developers four years of relative stagnation, but that’s an exception and it’s going to end soon enough anyway (unless, of course, these are just convulsions before slow death of technology). You better learn and you better learn fast, or you’ll have no other option than to promote yourself into management. Third, just how long can you sit by your computer everyday? Yeah, I know, some people spend years playing WoW, Eve and alike, barely moving. I am a sinner myself, with Steam reporting over 350 hours in Modern Warfare 2, 200 hours in F.E.A.R. 2 multi, and countless months of my life wasted by Sid’s Civilization. But for not-addicted, it’s just simply stupid, not to mention unhealthy, to have your ass integrated with the chair. No matter how comfortable it may be. There is more to life than that. Case Study at my company It all started with a few SQL programmers grumbling about how they are bored to death, and how they would like to switch to OO programming. I’m not a person who waits, so next thing I did was asking our management if they could move those guys to Java/C# projects. And the management was all for it, with just one requirement: they would have to first learn our technology stack at home, not to be totally lost and unproductive. After all, the more technologies an employee know, the more valuable he is for the employer (think about switching people between projects). A few months later and nothing has changed. I’m asking sql guys how the learning is going, and I get the answer: it hasn’t started yet. Now, I know the best way to learn something is by hands-on experience at work. After all that’s why I’ve been changing my job a few times: to have a real world experience. It’s easier to learn french if you move to Paris. And learning at home is hard because of the aforementioned reasons. The very same reasons, why you get only 650 people on a free conference, like Javarsovia. So what can we do, then? How about we remove all the obstacles? How about we make learning at home fun, satisfying and profitable. How about we provide  motivation and feedback. How about we also solve the never-ending dissonance between employee’s financial and employer’s productivity expectations on the way. Sounds interesting? Let’s try, then. First: make it profitable. Up to some point, people get motivated by money. It won’t work if you are already earning enough to pay for everything you need, but in a country like Poland, to be able to build/buy yourself a house, you have to be making many times the average salary. So here, money is still a major motivator. Every year, every developer goes back to his boss and says: I want more. Guess what, your boss wants to pay you more. No kidding. After all Henry Ford’s said:

“There is one rule for industrialists and that is: make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible”. Highest wages. You boss really wants to pay more. But to stay in business, the company needs you to either improve the quality or productivity. Both mean more money to the business, and more money to pay you with. If you consider that, the goal of a developer who wants to learn something new (or get better at something) is on the way to make the company more profitable. After all, this is software development – you never know what technology you gonna need tomorrow. This works both for completely new stuff, and for learning something that company is already quite good at. If you know several technologies that the company is working with, you are more valuable, because you can handle more projects (you boss may think in terms of reallocating resources). After thinking about all of this I went to my bosses and asked them: will you pay more to the people who learn different technologies at home? Even when they can’t use them right now at work? Will you give a rise to those Oracle guys, if they learn Java? The answer was: definitely! They actually said that every time a developer asks for a rise, they ask him back: what have you done in the last year to improve your market value? What have you learned? Because every time an employee’s market value increases, the company’s value increases. Simply speaking: more skills means more money. Both for the developer and for the company. It’s amazing, how often people forget about it. Making it crystal clear can give you a motivational boost to do something at home and a nice perspective. You don’t have to switch your job to get a rise. You need to learn more, and they’ll happily pay you more. Second: make it easy The main question with learning is where to start from? And for software developers it’s the most important, most difficult question, because there is no way to learn everything, because spending years studying can be simply a waste of time, if the technology is dead/outdated the moment you get productive with it. What should I learn or why should I learn at all, if the risk of wasting the most precious thing in my life, my time, is so high? How do I decide what to learn. Lets make learning safe and easy. Your best bet is to start with something that has much longer life expectancy, something that will help you right away, no matter what a technology you have to work with in your next project. And something that is relatively simple to learn: agile skills. These are skills of an agile developer, well established, well recognized, and not going away any time soon, because we still do not have anything on the horizon that could surpass them. Yeah, I know, the world ‘agile’ is so popular nowadays, that even my grandma is agile, but lets go for a solid list of things agile. No bullshit theory, no marketing mumbo jumbo, give me a precise, distilled and refined list of things I should learn, things that will help me, things worth spending my time on. Here it is: The Agile Skills Project The project is all about self improvement and learning. It’s a great inventory of “ isolated, learned, practiced, and refined” agile skills, with definitions, resources, descriptions of steps to mastery and success stories. Take a look at the “Pair Programming” page, for example. All the skills are divided into different areas: Business Value, Collaboration, Confidence, Product, Self Improvement, Supportive Culture, Technical Excellence. You even get a nice mind-map with it. This is a single reference point for all those who do not know where to start or where to go next. All these skills are in high demand on the market and with a very long Time-To-Live. The best thing is though: no matter what technology you gonna work with tomorrow, you can benefit from them. I took the list from the website, tidied it up a bit, refactored it for the needs of my company, and proposed it as a Request For Comment, a wiki page, where everyone gets to discuss and shape up the idea, before we give it to the management. Soon we had a discussion. It wasn’t easy to make everyone understand the concept, but after a while people joined in, and we added some more stuff. Level up! The Agile Skills Project is more than a simple index. It tries to create a learning ecosystem, by defining quests:
“Quests” are on-the-job experiments, self-assessments, peer-reviews, course experiences or other activities intended to help a person better apply a particular agile developer skill set. It’s a bit like a Role Playing Game. You have your quests, you do them, you get experience. For experience you get more money and new toys (technologies) to play with.  It’s fun. Billions of MMORPG players cannot be wrong. But to make that happen we need something every game has: feedback. Third: give feedback OK, so we have a bit of motivation (money) and a list of goals (agile skills). Who is going to give us quests, and who is going to tell us we did a good job? How will we have our feedback? The first and most important thing, is to see the results of you actions. Otherwise you loose focus and motivation (money can only get you that far). Therefore you should create a list of quests you have done. Put it on the intranet or somewhere, where you can show it to others. It’s important, because you are going to share it with your mentor. Yes, a mentor. Choose someone from your company, someone you trust, someone you respect. It doesn’t have to be an Einstein. Meet with this person once a month, during your work-time. An hour should do. Discuss with your mentor what quests you want to accomplish this month. Could be anything, reading an IT book, learning new programming language or taking another step to master one of the agile skills from the list. Tell your mentor when you’ll be done. Meet together again next month, and either put the quest in your done-list, or mark it as ‘failed’. The role of the mentor is to listen to you, remove obstacles, help you choose a good path and give you feedback. You’ll be surprised by how much the meeting with your mentor motivates you. It works much better than money: you don’t want to fail in the eyes of the mentor, because this is the guy you respect, and you want him to respect you as well. And once you see your constant improvement by filling the list of quests done with your mentor, it gets addictive. Smells corporate? How is this any different to what you can sometimes see in a corporation, with a year long plan of tasks your boss is giving you to accomplish to get your bonus? Well, first of all, these will be your quests, chosen by you. Second, you will choose your mentor as well. Your boss usually doesn’t know a thing about what you are doing. Third, it’s all about your self-improvement, not meeting some company goals. You get better at something, the company gets better at something. After all a company is not much more than the people working at it.  Fourth, it’s a fast feedback cycle, you do not have to wait till the end of the year to get it. And finally, it may be a bit corporate, because I have never seen any small company doing anything like this. But even if it is, it still seems like worthwhile. Anything to get me out of the couch. Discuss It’s a bit too early to tell whether the idea will be successful. We have just started. Fo me it is already helpfull, because with a list of quests done I have have a feeling of progress. If you’d like to discuss this, and other ways to animate software developers to do something more, I’m leading a meeting at Agile Warsaw group about it, on the 20th of September, 19:00. Feel invited. By the way, here you have a trial of “other ways to animate” from our internal TouK Code Jam Party, we held a week ago. Doesn’t look mych corporate, does it?

Solution Architect @ TouK

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DDevelopment & Design

Grails render as JSON catch

One of a reasons your controller doesn't render a proper response in JSON format might be wrong package name that you use. It is easy to overlook. Import are on top of a file, you look at your code and everything seems to be fine. Except response is still not in JSON format.

Consider this simple controller:

class RestJsonCatchController {
def grailsJson() {
render([first: 'foo', second: 5] as grails.converters.JSON)
    }

def netSfJson() {
render([first: 'foo', second: 5] as net.sf.json.JSON)
    }
}

And now, with finger crossed... We have a winner!

$ curl localhost:8080/example/restJsonCatch/grailsJson
{"first":"foo","second":5}
$ curl localhost:8080/example/restJsonCatch/netSfJson
{first=foo, second=5}

As you can see only grails.converters.JSON converts your response to JSON format. There is no such converter for net.sf.json.JSON, so Grails has no converter to apply and it renders Map normally.

Conclusion: always carefully look at your imports if you're working with JSON in Grails!

Edit: Burt suggested that this is a bug. I've submitted JIRA issue here: GRAILS-9622 render as class that is not a codec should throw exception

DDevelopment & Design

How to use mocks in controller tests

Even since I started to write tests for my Grails application I couldn't find many articles on using mocks. Everyone is talking about tests and TDD but if you search for it there isn't many articles.

Today I want to share with you a test with mocks for a simple and complete scenario. I have a simple application that can fetch Twitter tweets and present it to user. I use REST service and I use GET to fetch tweets by id like this: http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/show/236024636775735296.json. You can copy and paste it into your browser to see a result.

My application uses Grails 2.1 with spock-0.6 for tests. I have TwitterReaderService that fetches tweets by id, then I parse a response into my Tweet class.


class TwitterReaderService {
    Tweet readTweet(String id) throws TwitterError {
        try {
            String jsonBody = callTwitter(id)
            Tweet parsedTweet = parseBody(jsonBody)
            return parsedTweet
        } catch (Throwable t) {
            throw new TwitterError(t)
        }
    }

    private String callTwitter(String id) {
        // TODO: implementation
    }

    private Tweet parseBody(String jsonBody) {
        // TODO: implementation
    }
}

class Tweet {
    String id
    String userId
    String username
    String text
    Date createdAt
}

class TwitterError extends RuntimeException {}

TwitterController plays main part here. Users call show action along with id of a tweet. This action is my subject under test. I've implemented some basic functionality. It's easier to focus on it while writing tests.


class TwitterController {
    def twitterReaderService

    def index() {
    }

    def show() {
        Tweet tweet = twitterReaderService.readTweet(params.id)
        if (tweet == null) {
            flash.message = 'Tweet not found'
            redirect(action: 'index')
            return
        }

        [tweet: tweet]
    }
}

Let's start writing a test from scratch. Most important thing here is that I use mock for my TwitterReaderService. I do not construct new TwitterReaderService(), because in this test I test only TwitterController. I am not interested in injected service. I know how this service is supposed to work and I am not interested in internals. So before every test I inject a twitterReaderServiceMock into controller:


import grails.test.mixin.TestFor
import spock.lang.Specification

@TestFor(TwitterController)
class TwitterControllerSpec extends Specification {
    TwitterReaderService twitterReaderServiceMock = Mock(TwitterReaderService)

    def setup() {
        controller.twitterReaderService = twitterReaderServiceMock
    }
}

Now it's time to think what scenarios I need to test. This line from TwitterReaderService is the most important:


Tweet readTweet(String id) throws TwitterError

You must think of this method like a black box right now. You know nothing of internals from controller's point of view. You're only interested what can be returned for you:

  • a TwitterError can be thrown
  • null can be returned
  • Tweet instance can be returned

This list is your test blueprint. Now answer a simple question for each element: "What do I want my controller to do in this situation?" and you have plan test:

  • show action should redirect to index if TwitterError is thrown and inform about error
  • show action should redirect to index and inform if tweet is not found
  • show action should show found tweet

That was easy and straightforward! And now is the best part: we use twitterReaderServiceMock to mock each of these three scenarios!

In Spock there is a good documentation about interaction with mocks. You declare what methods are called, how many times, what parameters are given and what should be returned. Remember a black box? Mock is your black box with detailed instruction, e.g.: I expect you that if receive exactly one call to readTweet with parameter '1' then you should throw me a TwitterError. Rephrase this sentence out loud and look at this:


1 * twitterReaderServiceMock.readTweet('1') >> { throw new TwitterError() }

This is a valid interaction definition on mock! It's that easy! Here is a complete test that fails for now:


import grails.test.mixin.TestFor
import spock.lang.Specification

@TestFor(TwitterController)
class TwitterControllerSpec extends Specification {
    TwitterReaderService twitterReaderServiceMock = Mock(TwitterReaderService)

    def setup() {
        controller.twitterReaderService = twitterReaderServiceMock
    }

    def "show should redirect to index if TwitterError is thrown"() {
        given:
            controller.params.id = '1'
        when:
            controller.show()
        then:
            1 * twitterReaderServiceMock.readTweet('1') >> { throw new TwitterError() }
            0 * _._
            flash.message == 'There was an error on fetching your tweet'
            response.redirectUrl == '/twitter/index'
    }
}

| Failure:  show should redirect to index if TwitterError is thrown(pl.refaktor.twitter.TwitterControllerSpec)
|  pl.refaktor.twitter.TwitterError
 at pl.refaktor.twitter.TwitterControllerSpec.show should redirect to index if TwitterError is thrown_closure1(TwitterControllerSpec.groovy:29)

You may notice 0 * _._ notation. It says: I don't want any other mocks or any other methods called. Fail this test if something is called! It's a good practice to ensure that there are no more interactions than you want.

Ok, now I need to implement controller logic to handle TwitterError.


class TwitterController {

    def twitterReaderService

    def index() {
    }

    def show() {
        Tweet tweet

        try {
            tweet = twitterReaderService.readTweet(params.id)
        } catch (TwitterError e) {
            log.error(e)
            flash.message = 'There was an error on fetching your tweet'
            redirect(action: 'index')
            return
        }

        [tweet: tweet]
    }
}

My tests passes! We have two scenarios left. Rule stays the same: TwitterReaderService returns something and we test against it. So this line is the heart of each test, change only returned values after >>:


1 * twitterReaderServiceMock.readTweet('1') >> { throw new TwitterError() }

Here is a complete test for three scenarios and controller that passes it.


import grails.test.mixin.TestFor
import spock.lang.Specification

@TestFor(TwitterController)
class TwitterControllerSpec extends Specification {

    TwitterReaderService twitterReaderServiceMock = Mock(TwitterReaderService)

    def setup() {
        controller.twitterReaderService = twitterReaderServiceMock
    }

    def "show should redirect to index if TwitterError is thrown"() {
        given:
            controller.params.id = '1'
        when:
            controller.show()
        then:
            1 * twitterReaderServiceMock.readTweet('1') >> { throw new TwitterError() }
            0 * _._
            flash.message == 'There was an error on fetching your tweet'
            response.redirectUrl == '/twitter/index'
    }

    def "show should inform about not found tweet"() {
        given:
            controller.params.id = '1'
        when:
            controller.show()
        then:
            1 * twitterReaderServiceMock.readTweet('1') >> null
            0 * _._
            flash.message == 'Tweet not found'
            response.redirectUrl == '/twitter/index'
    }


    def "show should show found tweet"() {
        given:
            controller.params.id = '1'
        when:
            controller.show()
        then:
            1 * twitterReaderServiceMock.readTweet('1') >> new Tweet()
            0 * _._
            flash.message == null
            response.status == 200
    }
}

class TwitterController {

    def twitterReaderService

    def index() {
    }

    def show() {
        Tweet tweet

        try {
            tweet = twitterReaderService.readTweet(params.id)
        } catch (TwitterError e) {
            log.error(e)
            flash.message = 'There was an error on fetching your tweet'
            redirect(action: 'index')
            return
        }

        if (tweet == null) {
            flash.message = 'Tweet not found'
            redirect(action: 'index')
            return
        }

        [tweet: tweet]
    }
}

The most important thing here is that we've tested controller-service interaction without logic implementation in service! That's why mock technique is so useful. It decouples your dependencies and let you focus on exactly one subject under test. Happy testing!