Practical Best Programming with Steven Feuerstein

Today, I attended a free, half day presentation given by Steven Feuerstein. Steven stopped for a day in Slovenia on his way from Zagreb to Bratislava. Event was sponsored by Quest (MRI d.o.o) as part of the promotion of their new tool, called Code Tester for Oracle.
The last time I had a chance to listen to his presentation was 10 years ago, at EOUG in Amsterdam. Back then, he was already a well known for his in-depth PL/SQL knowledge, writing skills and his amusing presentation style. Today, it seems to me, that he is still as enthusiastic about PL/SQL as he was ten years ago, not to mention that he is still one of the best technical speakers that I know of. You simply can’t be bored while listening to him, even if you don’t have a clue about the PL/SQL. Wonderful.
The main topic was test driven development, a trend in software development in the recent years, that we all hear/read about it quite often, but rarely practice it. Why? Because it’s usually hard to do it right. Right? In reality our beloved users test our code. ;-)
Steven mentioned Gartner group reasearch that indicate that for every line of code you have to write ten lines of test code. Ah, yes – don’t forget that test code need testing too ;-), so you really have to add some overhead to that figure. Who has time to do that?
If you’re PL/SQL developer trying to write PL/SQL test code first (personally, I don’t know anyone!) and real code second, you should really give it a try and test out the Code tester for Oracle (Steven himself devoted last two years of his time to this project!). Don’t take this as a cheap marketing plug from my part, it’s just that I have a feeling that Quest has a really unique tool, unmatched on the market and it’s not expensive (580€/developer at present, with 30% discount if ordered before September 25th, 2007)).

If you’re from Slovenia (or nearby), mark the December 3th-4th, 2007 – Steven will be back, with a two day seminar.

Now, I just want to write down some useful links if you wish to read the presentation material, play a game of SET etc.:

Advertisement

Posted on 05.09.2007, in Blog and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink. Comments Off on Practical Best Programming with Steven Feuerstein.

Comments are closed.