Week 1^2 + 1^2 + 2^2 + 3^2

Tags: English, university
Created on Sun, 16 Feb 2014

Behavior driven development is a new thing for me. It looks like an improved, revised and more human-oriented refinement of Test driven development. It describes the process as a human would like to see, not in terms of some artificial tests that while might be uselful, are sometimes hard to grasp. The workshop on JBehave is easy to follow and useful.

HOWEVER... I start feeling that PSD tries to introduce as many software frameworks as possible in it's given timeframe without actually giving us the time to explore it and really understand it. Starting with the Spring fiasco in the first semester, where we were already overloaded with work from other courses, this brought nothing new to my mind and as a team we strugled to understand exactly what is that and why we would need it to do our second sprint. We continue with Jenkins, OSGi (Apache Felix) and now JBehave. While it may be interesting to get a taste of the technology, I don't think it's too productive as it mostly wastes our time not doing our team project which for most teams is in it's final stages. I know that because I worked with Ant and Maven during the summer and I am convinced that the time PSD gave us for ant and ivy was not nearly enough to get what is happening. I am hearing the voices of my fellow students that say they have no idea what these are doing at all. And I feel like them for the rest of the frameworks.

Wouldn't it be better to merge PSD and the Team Project? Remove the artificial excercises that PSD gives and rather use them in practice in the real Project. Still keep the lectures and optional tutorials, but don't force us to use frameworks which we can't possibly grasp in less than a week. Rather give us the option to use whatever we want covering the principles of PSD in our team project. Wouldn't that make more sense?