These last couple of weeks I have been working with a Windows desktop app based on WPF. I hadn’t been involved with that in quite some time so there was some trepidation before I got stuck in.

I have been pairing consistently throughout and I believe it has been very helpful for both parties as the union of our skill sets have been quite large and varied regardless of which colleague I was working with at the time. The app had interesting object life-cycles and has some issues in object creation when viewed from the standpoint of what we need to do today although it was well suited to solve the problems it did at the time it was written.

Working closely with colleagues mean that we could make fairly informed decisions whilst refactoring and the discussions have seemed productive. I tend to always feel that the code is significantly improved as we finish tasks even though we have stayed close to the task at hand and avoided refactoring for its own sake.

Given the rebootcamp experience, I’m always looking to make smaller classes with encapsulated functionality, but I still have room for improvement. As I’m fortunate enough to have very skilled colleagues it is always useful to discuss these things in the pair.  It helps to have another pair of eyes there to figure out ways to proceed – getting things done whilst working to gradually improve the design. I haven’t felt disappointed with a piece of code I’ve helped write for quite a while.

The way we currently work is that we elaborate tasks with product and test people and write acceptance criteria together before we set out to implement the changes. This means we figure out, most of the time, how to use unit tests to prove our acceptance criteria,without having to write elaborate integration tests, keeping them fairly simple trying to wrestle the test triangle the right way up .

All this feels like a lot of overhead for a bit of hacking, but we tend to do things only once now rather than having to go back and change something because QA or PM aren’t happy. There are some UI state changes which are difficult to test comprehensively, so we have had things hit us that were unexpected, and we did have to change the design slightly in some cases to make it more robust and testable, but that still felt under control compared with how hard UI bugs can be to track down.

Whatevs. This is where I am on my journey now. I feel like I’m learning more stuff and that I am developing. At my age that is no small thing.