Wedesday: New Co-op member, new projects, actual programming

My first week is now long gone, and now I'm no longer the new guy here at iQ. This week, we already have 2 new members on the team: Wilson as another devel co-op member and Phil as the QA lead (not sure exactly what that is). Hope they have a good time fitting in. 

Looking back on the first week, there were a lot of meetings. Tons of meetings. Talking about design, planning, agile development estimation workshops. I did my fair share of reading. I went through a few books here and there, trying to fill in the gaps in knowledge that came up as the tasks came up. I first read a few chapters of Agile Samurai, having to do with estimation, then tried my best at reading a DDD and Design something book, but had a really hard time getting through it. I finally got settled into the book called Domain Driven Design, by Eric Evans, and finally found one that was readable and accessible. My knowledge of DDD is still a little limited though, and I think that has to do with the exact applicability of the design practice. Since I have little experience with designing anything, I think the examples are still a little inaccessible. I'll continue with it, and I'll comment on DDD when I get a better understanding of how to describe it.

The last week also had a lot of setup and a lot of wiki writing. Glossary writing so that there was a defined Ubiquitous Language. Making sure that with the rapid expansion of our team, we had enough ramp up documents to help people get through their training. I'm now though finally getting ready to do some actual programming of my own. I've read a bunch of people's sample code, and got a little more acquainted with unit testing. I'm still not sure how to define it, but it seems like unit testing is simply a way to test out code for correct results. That is, instead of debugging once the code is finished, a developer can write a unit test that simply tests for correct results in real time. There's a document written by another co-op member, Andy Tan, that describes the unit testing process very well. The two unit testing regimes or frameworks that I'm using are NUnit and NUnit with MSpec. Still not sure how the two differ yet, but I'm actually researching that now. I'll be researching the pros and cons of each, and then writing a program to check the availability of wsdl services.