Still waiting for laptop and getting good training.

Well, the IT department is still delaying on my laptop as Sager does not extend a line of credit. *sigh* I found another vendor that has a similar rebadged Clevo laptop but for about the same price I can get Quad Xeon procs if I drop the BlueRay burner. The burner isn't a big deal and I'd rather have the extra horsepower.

The past two weeks I have been recieving training in "Agile Mastery" and "Test Driven Development" and I think both are pretty darn cool. I really enjoyed the "Test Driven Development" training and got a lot out of it.

I can see where the Agile process can be really handy. Load testing has always been the bane of the developer and PM since we usually find problems during the final testing phase and force code re-work and push back go-live dates. I know that I've pushed many a project back to the shagrin of many a program manager. Tough chit I always say.

If all goes well, we will eventually have automated LTs with the continuous integration and that should be real cool. I still see formalized before/after load tests at the end of each iteration for formal iteration results, though.

TDD seemed really bass-ackwards to me at first but after I got into it, I really dugg what I was seeing. The night of the second day of class I continued working on JUnit tests for the lab and went back to refactor some of my code and I got a real warm and fuzzy feeling from being able to re-execute those unit tests and seeing that I hadn't changed the end results of my methods that I had refactored. Suh-weet!

I am hoping to start creating VS2008 coded web tests for the project on Monday. The customer has agreed to supply information but it looks like that I will be volunteered to scrub the data of any identifying information (which, while a pain, is a good thing to do). Hello, perl! I love perl for slicing and dicing.

In the TDD class I was also introduced to the Eclipse IDE. From the folks that I have been talking with they really seem to like the Eclipse IDE more than the VS IDE. So, I took it upon myself to download the latest "Eclipse Classic" and give it a honest go. I found some plug-ins for perl, python/jython (I still want to play around with The Grinder 3), ruby (there is some RoR development here) and BeanShell (for JMeter development).

Can I really pry my hands off elvis for perl development? When I'm coding perl stuff my hands automagically go into vi mode. Normally I don't drop out of elvis for perl development unless I'm invoking Komodo for perl debugging. One of the other developers said that there is a plug-in for vi keybindings for Eclipse, so maybe there is hope after all!

If the data scrubbing goes well, I am hoping to finally be chunking FTP/SMTP data at the test servers and start doing some metrics collection and analysis.