Lifeware

1
Lifeware

• Spin off from Credit Suisse Life in 1999
• IT
• Actuarial Department
• Production
• Offering full ASP for life insurance companies
• Credit Suisse Winterthur CH
• LV1871 D
• Helvetia Patria D
• Coop National CH
• Convia CH
• PrismaLife D,A,CH
• 15 people

2
Lifeware and XP

• Using Xp from start
• Development Environment
• Using VisualWorks Smalltalk
• Database
• Gemstone Oodbms

3
Testing

• Current situation
• 8000 tests
• 17 minutes to run
• 50 code, 50 tests
• Test Documentation
• Executable
• Up to date
• Transition to testing _at_ Credit Suisse

4
Testing (2)

• At the beginning you have the impression that the
  tests are important, but do not deserve so much
  attention and maintenance as the code itself
• Writing tests is an order of magnitude more
  difficult than writing code
• Testing UI is more difficult than testing model.
  It took 2 years but now we found a satisfactory
  solution to test first web interfaces.
• Every bug we find has a special test suite

5
Test First

• Adding tests to your development process is not
  so difficult
• More difficult is the switch to test first
• never write code in the browser
• write code only in the debugger after running a
  test
• Stop thinking ahead

6
Refactoring

• Syntactic Refactoring
• Examples
• Unused class, variable, methods
• Long methods
• When twice a day, before integrating
• Semantic Refactoring
• Examples
• Parallel Hierarchies
• Testing user interface
• When when you have the right idea

7
Transition to refactoring

• Transition is not so difficult
• Full adoption is more difficult
• Using the refactory browser you can reach a new
  level of productivity

8
Continuous Integration

• Every pair integrates once a day
• 6 pairs 2 12 integration/day
• More often you integrate less problems you have

9
Small releases

• We release 2 times a week all productions
• we have to migrate the objects in production
• Transition until you do not have enough test
  extremely dangerous
• After going live at CS, I developed 2 months
  without integrating. It took 3 additional months
  to put the changes in production

10
Pair programming

• Fastest way to disseminate know-how
• You have always at least 2 people knowing some
  part of the system
• If code review is a good idea, doing it all the
  time is even better
• Releasing the pig .... is more difficult, because
  someone is always watching you
• Taking the wrong direction is minimized, even for
  experienced people

11
Pair Programming _at_ Lifeware

• Worst followed practice
• Remote (2 development centers with 7 people each)
• 10-30 production
• Not only pairing, but also switching the pairs

12
Code ownership

• Everybody can change anything
• Precondition for refactory
• Piecemeal cleaning

13
myXP
Analysis
Design
Implementation
Testing
Production
Development
Production
2-3 months
10 years ..
14
XP lessons learned

• XP puts the bar very high
• XP can get out of control easy
• Example Refactory under time contraints
• Example Long methods
• XP seems very anarchic, but requires a lot of
  discipline

15
XP in production

• The practices of XP are important in the
  development phase, but becomes unavoidable in
  production
• We change the production daily instead of annually

16
XP your Customer

• XP requires a different relationship with the
  customer. Fixed price, fixed scope contracts are
  simply not working. You have to reinvent the
  relationship with your customer. Some ideas
• Optional scope contracts
• Pay per use

17
XP in other fields

• We transferred XP practices to control the
  quality of the production (life insurance policy
  management)
• Daily alerters (Testing)
• Weekly closures instead of annual closures (Small
  Releases)