................Agile Bazaar July 31 Meeting................

Topic: "Test Driven Development for Data Management projects using
FIT4Data" by Adrian Mowat

PLEASE NOTE: The Agile Bazaar Yahoo Group is currently unavailable.
Yahoo has been contacted and has stated that their efforts to resolve
the problem are high priority. However, if you know of any interested
parties or organizations, please do not hesitate to inform them.

Our Speaker: Adrian comes to us from Glasgow, and will be in Boston
briefly to preview a presentation he'll give at Agile 2008 in Toronto.
Adrian has pioneered the use of practical agile software techniques in
the world of massive databases, and data migrations and transformations.


Where: MIT, E51-315
Map at http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?mapterms=E51

When: Thursday July 31
6:00pm networking
7:00 - 8:30 Presentation and discussion
8:30 - ?? Drinks & food over at Cambridge Brewing Co.
(Each pay their own way)

Cost: Free
Further details posted at http://www.agilebazaar.org/


Presenter's Description:
The tools and techniques needed to do Test Driven Development are
extremely well documented for Object Oriented languages, but how do we
do TDD data management and business intelligence projects using 4th
generation ETL languages like Ab Initio?

In this talk, I will show you how to do TDD when transforming data is
the sole aim of the project. The talk will be divided into two parts.
First, the theory of TDD in data management applications and, second,
the application of the practices using FIT4Data.

FIT4Data is a testing framework for data management applications built
on the Java implementation of FIT. It allows developers to write
FIT-like tests using the programming language of their choice. This is
essential in the ETL domain where the key technical skills are UNIX
scripting and the ETL language used on the project and most developers
do not know Java (or any other OO language) so they are not equipped
to write fixtures in the usual fashion. Furthermore, FIT4Data provides
direct support for common ETL tasks like integrating with a UNIX shell
environment and maintaining reusable data sets.

FIT4Data is available to download at it's home on Google Code -
http://code.google.com/p/fit4data

In the first part, I explain how to break a typical set of customer
requirements and business rules down into chunks suitable for TDD and
then how to define testable scenarios around them. In the second part,
I will show how to use FIT4Data to build and run the tests and build
the application using TDD using practical examples.