comparison | Mind-driven development

Will Windows Azure succeed?

On PDC 2008 Ray Ozzie went out on a limb by saying that Windows Azure will be „setting the stage for the next 50 years of systems“. Everyone (me too) was excited about this new technology and people got inspired by Microsoft’s vision and its new cloud computing platform.

16 months later, here we are: Windows Azure is live, the platform has been consolidated (R.I.P., Live Framework…) and data centers have been built up around the world.

But is Windows Azure this game changer that Microsoft promised and which they bet on? Will Windows Azure (as product) succeed? I’m not sure, but let’s see…

First things first

My thoughts on this topic have a certain background. In 2009 my company SDX invested significant research time into the innovative areas of cloud computing in general and Windows Azure in particular. And we’re still moving forward in this area. In scope of the NewCloudApp() contest we made up a little showcase named Rating Stress Simulator which you can see on the right and which you can try out now on Windows Azure.

On the architectural side we tried to use many of the possibilities offered by Windows Azure: WebRole, WorkerRole, message queue, table storage, WCF service hosted in the WebRole, …

We gathered some experiences with Windows Azure, both on the technical and on the business side. We find the platform very promising and we believe that it’s the best cloud platform on the market from a technical point of view. It gives great flexibility for developers while still utilizing their existing technical skills with .NET, Visual Studio, SQL Server and others.

Costs always matter!

While we see a great platform we’re also unsure if we should bet on Windows Azure. The main reason for this are the fixed costs for idle hosting. This means the costs for just holding our application online and running without any user on it. For this task our simple application with two roles, a message queue and table storage (no SQL DB included!) has monthly costs of about 130€ (~177$)! The main costs come from the two running roles and I’m gonna tell you: we aren’t happy with the current situation.

And we’re not alone with our criticism. Windows Azure costs are highly debated these days and to make hosting small applications on Azure less expensive is the no. 1 request of developers who voted on the My Great Windows Azure Idea website. Several blog posts and discussions run into the same direction. When people realized that Azure computation costs are based on wall clock time and not on real CPU time they equally realized that hosting on Windows Azure is ridiculously expensive compared to other options on the market.

Let’s do another calculation example for idle costs. Let’s imagine a little start-up application with 2 roles (small instance), 1 Web DB and 1 AppFabric Service Bus connection, up and running all the time and waiting there to be used. This scenario leads to monthly costs of about 137€ (~193$), which results in costs for 1 year of 1610€ (~2270$)! Those idle costs are fixed costs for this scenario which outline the entrance barrier for just holding the application online without any traffic. Isn’t one of the basic ideas of cloud computing to keep the fixed costs low and transform them into variable costs? At least Windows Azure doesn’t follow this idea or not on a reasonable scale… Hence it isn’t attractive for start-ups and little companies which could buy and run a server on their own for these costs and get full flexibility.

Competitors

But what about the offers of other companies and their attractivity? I’ll start with shared hosting as possibility to outsource infrastructure and application hosting. Shared hosting is many times cheaper in comparison to Windows Azure. For sure Windows Azure offers additional values: deployment, management, scalability. But the point is that for most people who are interested in Azure those values don’t matter much. For most people, companies and their applications those qualities are not nearly justifying the higher costs of Azure hosting compared to shared hosting.

But let’s come to two ‚real‘ cloud providers: Google with its AppEngine offers a certain amount of free quotas and in measuring computation costs they got the right idea. Google charges only for the actual consumption of CPU time (in comparison to the wall-clock-time-based model of Windows Azure), thus you are not charged for idle time of your processes.

Amazon with its EC2 calculates on a wall clock time basis, but here you have the full flexibility of arming your VMs with everything you want.

And then there’s Microsoft with Windows Azure which doesn’t include the benefits of both models. On the one side Windows Azure charges you on a wall clock time basis and thus you’re paid for idle time of your applications as well. On the other side Windows Azure is VM-based where every „role“ depicts an application fragment that maps 1:1 to a VM. The serious drawback here is that you are not able to host more than 1 role in a single VM instance. Thus you don’t get any of the flexibility of Amazon’s EC2 VMs.

Microsoft should revise this role/VM-based scaling model and/or the wall clock time basis. With the current model it’s not attractive for hobby developers, start-ups and smaller companies. The entrance barrier is ways too high and the scalability is too limited. Why should any small company use Windows Azure over AppEngine or Ec2? I don’t know…

But what are the implications of not attracting hobby developers, start-ups and little companies? Perhaps we could learn from the past, so let’s take a look in history…

A brief look in history

Some days ago an older colleague of mine told me from the rise of Windows and the fail of OS/2 Warp (this was before my active computer time, so it was interesting to hear this story from ancient ages…). He told me that OS/2 had striking features on the technical side in comparison with Windows, but it couldn’t win the OS war. It was beaten by Windows and died a slow and painful death…

One reason he sees for this is the poor attraction of hobby developers and the inability to build up a big developer community around OS/2. Windows came with a cheap compiler which enabled everyone to write his own Windows software. Microsoft was able to attract hobbyists which resulted in a huge software pool of shareware, freeware etc. and yielded a large developer community and knowledge base to develop applications for Windows. OS/2 Warp failed in this case: the IBM compiler was expensive (> 1000 Deutschmark, that’s about 650$ in the year 1990) and even while the platform and technical features were great, nobody was attracted to develop against it due to the high entrance barrier of development costs. OS/2 couldn’t generate a critical mass of developers, development knowledge and subsequently software as output for the users.

Hobby developers matter!

I don’t get around to see parallels between OS/2 and Windows Azure on the costs side. Microsoft should learn from history and should prevent mistakes that have been done by others before. It’s crucial to attract a broad range of developers to use Windows Azure for expressing their ideas and building the next wave of killer applications. With the current costs just very few developers will be attracted to make experiences with the platform. But that’s a big mistake!

By bringing Windows Azure to hobby developers and smaller companies, Microsoft would open heavy doors to the real business. Developers and architects would take their experiences with the platform from their personal lifes to the business and would promote Windows Azure when asked for it or when to decide for the platform of a new application. Accordingly the entrance barrier even for bigger companies would be ways lower: developers who have gained experience with the platform would be able to spread their knowledge to colleagues. This builds up a chain reaction and an exponential growing amount of developers would use the platform. It would be the best promotion for Windows Azure that Microsoft could get.

For today because of the costs not many developers will suggest Windows Azure with good conscience and that’s a pitty. Please, Microsoft: Community matters! Realize the potential of your platform and the implications that come with the amount of hobby developers who are using Windows Azure.

The need for a „Mini Azure“ offer

One suggestion follows: realize a „Mini Azure“ package as new offer on your Azure platform. Low costs (<10$ per month), few resources, no dedicated machines, weak SLAs, but online 24×7 – just being there to get people started. Remove this high entrance barrier or you will go the OS/2 way down the road. Your great platform leads you nowhere and will not succeed, if you don’t have people who use it…

Mini Azure has been suggested by Jouni Heikniemi before, so take a look at what he and others say.

Conclusion

To summarize things: if nothing changes I’m currently afraid that Microsoft fails with Windows Azure, at least I fear it will be a non-starter. And that’s a bad basis for future development. At the moment Microsoft scares people away and they will meet problems to get them back. I say it again: I think they have a very good development platform. But the best platform doesn’t lead them anywhere if it’s too expensive for people to use this platform.

Comparison: DbC and TDD – Part 4

Let’s start the last part of my little blog post series regarding the comparison of DbC and TDD. This post is about code changes and the support of clean code principles by either DbC and TDD.

Code changes

Changing code is a big challenge for ensuring software quality and software design as well. It’s an important but often underestimated topic. If new features should be implemented or existing requirements change you should be able to change your code in a way that ensures correctness for the behavior of the new and the existing code base and you should be able to keep a consistent design.

With TDD you set up a nice test suite and tests can be run in a reproducible way. If requirements change or are extended and you adapt/extend your code, with TDD you first have to rewrite and/or extend your tests to fit the new set of requirements. But then by running your adapted test suite you can catch unexpected side effects from your code changes. This regression testing is a great safety net for those changes. Without such a test suite how could you be sure that the expected behavior still holds after the code has changed? Tests in a TDD way are great for continuous integration. When a developer in your team changes code and performs a check-in, with clear unit tests you are able to validate the changes during a continuous integration build. With a constraint on the minimum value of allowed code coverage this gives you a great confidence that a code change has no side effects which affect the expected behavior of your components. Moreover TDD ensures a more consistent API design over code changes. By writing tests before implementing new requirements you continuously adapt your design from a client view.

A drawback of tests is the effort to manually write and adapt tests. When behavior changes and old tests fail you have to investigate why those tests fail, thus what the old behavior has been and if this behavior has changed or if your implementation is simply wrong. With huge test suites maintainability can become a very time-consumptive task. Another important issue with TDD and automated tests in general is that any developer who joins your project must have a good comprehension for the TDD process and for automated tests. For many developers TDD is not very intuitive at the beginning and it’s overwhelming them by completely exchanging their development styles and habits. Becoming familiar with TDD could be an important gap for developers and giving all developers in a project the same comprehension for the process can be difficult (especially if they don’t see the benefits of TDD). That’s a question of accountability and project lead. There have to be project guidelines which include testing standards and there must be mechanisms to watch the adherence of those standards.

DbC can’t give you huge support for code changes out-of-the-box. If you only rely on runtime checking of the contracts you could not make a statement if an implementation still holds the contractual specification when code changes. Moreover you have to manually adapt your contracts when you change an implementation. There’s no direct mechanism besides the limited static checking that ensures the correctness of your implementations in terms of the defined contracts. The only solution is to set tests in place that validate the contracts for exemplaric input/output pairs. With such a test suite you can check in a reproducible way if your implementation still mirrors your contracts. But note: I don’t say that tests for contracts should be written manually. In my opinion it doesn’t make much sense, because both tests and contracts are a form of specification and with manually testing a contract you would duplicate the specification code! Moreover contracts already contain the relevant information which is needed to set up a test automatically. Solutions like Pex can jump in here to generate tests from scratch or from parameterized unit tests, using contracts as test oracles for accepted input values (preconditions) and expected output (postconditions).

Contracts have a gap for developers as well. Contracting can get messy and confusing if you are not able to give the developers on your project the very same comprehension of DbC: how and where to use contracts, limits for contract definitions and so on. As further drawback there is no possibility to check the percentage of contracting in a fashion of code coverage in TDD. A developer with no commonsense for the process could leave contracts and nobody would recognize and react. Again it’s the responsibility of the project lead to give guidelines on contracting and to observe the adherence of those guidelines.

Clean code principles

TDD and DbC both give great support to some important clean code principles and thus improve the software quality far beyond the bug prevention aspect.

YAGNI (You Ain’t Gonna Need It):
DbC cannot support you here, but the TDD process greatly supports YAGNI. For each new feature you write a test which leads to an implementation that reflects the test suite and which contains only those features that are really necessary.
SRP/SoC (Single Responsibility Principle/Separation of Concerns):
Both DbC and TDD support those principles. TDD has less impact, but in my opinion with TDD you early discover the dependencies of your components and thus you are encouraged to keep components clean. DbC is more offensive in terms of SRP and SoC. It’s difficult to write contracts for components with many responsibilities and thus DbC directly enforces a separation of concerns.
KISS (Keep It Simple and Stupid):
Both TDD and DbC add some value here. With TDD due to the incremental evolution an API is kept simple and client-friendly. For DbC the same rules apply as for SRP/SoC: It’s easy to define simple and stupid methods with clear contracts, but it’s hard to define contracts on complex and messy components.
DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself):
I don’t see support from TDD, but DbC influences the DRY principle. Because DbC introduces contracts that clarify benefits and obligations in client/supplier communication it prevents clients from checking return values and parameters redundantly. For example a postcondition says „the return value will never be null“. Thus there is no need for a client of the method to check the return value before handing it to another method that expects a non-null value as argument. This would be encouraged when you do defensive programming, but with DbC you can really prevent such redundancies.
OCP (Open/Closed Principle):
I don’t see big influence from both DbC and TDD here. OCP states: „Software entities should be open for extension, but closed for modification“. This means that your components should be easily extensible without the need for code modifications. OCP increases the level of abstraction and the code complexity, but it makes components easily extensible. With TDD you drive your API only for a current feature set and there seems to be no impact on extensibility. DbC with its contracts can’t help you here as well in my opinion.
ISP (Interface Segregation Principle):
Both DbC and TDD support the ISP. DbC influences ISP by the enforcement of SRP/SoC. When you set contracts on an interface with many responsibilities/members it would be painful to write invariants that must be maintained by each interface member. But it’s pretty easy if you have clear and simple interfaces. For TDD the impact is less, but it’s there since you early discover dependencies and you drive your API in a „segregated“ direction when implementing tests for new features.
DIP (Dependency Inversion Principle):
Support for this principle mainly comes from TDD, but DbC can add little value as well. With TDD to test a component in isolation you have to exchange dependencies of this component with test doubles like mocks or stubs. Thus you need abstractions/interfaces for those dependencies which enforces DIP. Then with Dependency Injection you are able to inject a test double at runtime of a test. The influence of DbC is more subtle. DbC encourages the use of interfaces at whole by enforcing uniform behavior over all implementations of an interface. Thus the use of interfaces instead of concrete implementations in terms of DIP is encouraged as well.
LSP (Liskov Substitution Principle):
TDD can’t help you here, but DbC adds great value. The LSP states that in class hierarchies it must be possible to treat a derived object as if it would be an object of the base class. Thus the specialized object must behave in the same way as the base class object. This principle of clear sub-classing is a basic part of DbC. Inheritors of a base class or implementors of an interface are not allowed to add new preconditions, but they can extend postconditions and invariants with additional contracts. Thus DbC guarantees uniform behavior in terms of the LSP.
CQS (Command-Query Separation):
TDD doesn’t encourage you to do CQS. But with DbC you need to separate commands as pure methods and queries in order to use commands in contracts. Thus DbC leads to command-query separation which is a good thing since it keeps your API clean (SoC) and your components simple (KISS).

Conclusion

This and the last blog posts gave a comparison of DbC and TDD by taking several aspects into account: specification, design, documentation, code coupling, universality, expressiveness, correctness checking, code changes and influence on clean code principles. While writing this little series of blog posts things became much clearer to me. When starting with DbC some months ago I just thought: „Well, forget TDD, DbC with static checking is all what we need and what we should use„. But that was thought too short. TDD goes far beyond testing and writing unit tests. At its heart TDD is more about design, documentation and specification and it’s really valuable in those (and other) terms.

Both DbC and TDD have advantages and drawbacks and both act on their own terrains with interesting overlaps. And it’s absolutely not a mutual exclusive choice between both principles. However TDD and DbC should be used in conjunction to utilize the advantages of both principles. In fact there should be a clear TDD process that makes use of contracts. As the previous blog posts showed DbC can support TDD, but there’s no possibility to replace it in any way.

Comparison: DbC and TDD – Part 3

This blog post is a continuation of the comparison between DbC and TDD that started with a dedicated look at code specification and covered other aspects in part 1 and part 2. It takes a look at further points and shows the characteristics (commonalities and differences) of TDD and DbC towards these aspects.

Universality

One of the most important differences between DbC and TDD is their different universality, because it influences expressiveness as well as verifiability of correctness.

A significant limitation (or better characteristic) of TDD is that tests are example-driven. With a normal manually written unit test you provide exemplaric input data and check for certain expected output values after the test run. Thus you have concrete pairs of input/output values to express a certain feature/behavior that you want to test. Since these values are only examples there has to be a process of finding relevant examples which can be very difficult. One step towards correctness is high code coverage. You should find examples that examine all paths of your code components. That can be a mess since the amount of possible code paths grows exponentially with the count of branches (if, switch/case, throw, …). But even if you find examples that give you 100% code coverage you cannot be sure that the component acts right for all possible input values. On the one side there could be hardware-dependent behavior (e.g. with arithmetic calculations) that leads to differences or exceptions (division-by-zero, underflow/overflow etc.). On the other side perhaps you get 100% code coverage for your components during the TDD process, but this doesn’t help much on integration with other code components or external systems that could act in complex ways. This problem goes beyond TDD. Thus unit tests in a TDD fashion are nice by their flexibility and simplicity, but they cannot give you full confidence. Solutions like Pex can help you here, but this is part of another story (that I hope to come up with in the near future).

DbC on the other side introduces universal contracts that must hold for every value that an object as part of a contract can take. That’s an important aspect to ensure correct behavior in all possible cases. Thus contracts have a higher value in terms of universality than tests (but they fall back in other terms).

Expressiveness

The expressiveness of a component’s behavior and qualities as part of its specification is an important aspect since you want to be able to express arbitrary properties in a flexible and easy way. Universality is one part of expressiveness and has just been discussed. Now let’s look at expressiveness on a broader scope.

TDD has a high value on expressiveness besides the exemplaric nature of tests. You are free to define tests which express any desired behavior of a component that can be written in code. With TDD you have full flexibility, but you are also responsible to get this flexibility under your control (clear processes should be what you need). One aspect that goes beyond the scope of TDD is interaction/collaborative testing and integration testing. The TDD process implies the design of code components in isolation, but it doesn’t guide you in testing the interactions between components (and specification of behavior which relies on those interactions). TDD is about unit testing, but there is a universe beyond that.

Their universal nature makes contracts in terms of DbC a valuable tool. And moreover by extending the definition of a code element they improve the expressiveness of these code elements, what’s great e.g. for the role of interfaces and for intention revealing. But they have downsides as well. First they are tightly bound to a certain code element and are not able to express behavior that spans several components (e.g. workflows and classes interacting together). And second they have a lack of what I would call contentual expressiveness. With contracts you are able to define expectations with arbitrary boolean expressions and that’s a great thing. But it’s also a limitation. For example if you have an algorithm or complex business operation then it’s difficult to impossible to define all expected outcomes of this code as universal boolean postcondition. In fact this would lead to full functional specification which implies a duplication of the algorithm logic itself (in imperative programming) and this would make no sense! On the other side if you use example-driven tests you would not have a problem since you should know what values to expect on a certain input. Furthermore no side effects are allowed inside of a contract. Hence if you use a method to define a more complex expectation this method must be pure (= free of visible side effects). The background of this constraint is that contracts mustn’t influence the behavior of the core logic itself. It would be a mess if there would be a different behavior depending on the activation state (enabled/disabled) of contracts (e.g. for different build configurations). This has a limitation if you want to define certain qualitites with contracts like x=pop(push(x)) for a stack implementation, but it has advantages as well, since it leads to the enforcement of command-query separation by contracts.

Checking correctness

Of course you want to be able to express as many behaviors as possible to improve the specification of your code components. But expressiveness is not leading anywhere when it’s impossible to figure out if your components follow the defined specification. You must be able to stress your components against their specification in a reproducible way to ensure correct behavior!

With TDD correctness of the defined behavior (= tests) can be checked by actually running the tests and validating expected values against the actual values as outcome of a test run. The system-under-test is seen as blackbox and behavior correctness is tested by writing values to the input channels of the blackbox and observe the output channels for correct values. This could include techniques like stubbing or mocking for handling an object in isolation and for ensuring reproducible and verifiable state and behavior. This testability and reproducibility in conjunction with a well implemented test harness is important for continuously checking correctness of your code through regression testing. It’s invaluable when performing continuous integration and when code is changed, but this aspect will be covered in the next blog post. However the exemplaric nature of tests is a limitation for checking correctness which has been shown above when discussing universality.

At first DbC as principle doesn’t help you in terms of checking correctness. It introduces a fail-fast strategy (if a contract is not met, it’s a bug – so fail fast and hard, because the developer has to fix the bug), but how can you verify the correctness of your implementation? With DbC bugs should be found in the debugging step when developing code, thus by actually executing the code. And common solutions like Code Contracts for .NET come with a runtime checking component that checks the satisfaction of the defined contracts when running the code. But this solution has a serious shortcoming: It relies on the current execution context of your code and hence it takes the current values for checking the contracts. With this you get the same problems as with tests. Your contracts are stressed by example and even worse you have no possibility to reproducible check your contracts! Thus dynamic checking without the usage of tests makes no sense. However contracts are a great complement of tests. They specify the conditions that must apply in general and thus a test as client of a component can satisfy the preconditions and then validate postconditions or custom test behavior. Another interesting possibility to verify contracts is static checking. Code Contracts come with a static checker as well that verifies the defined contracts at compile-time without executing the code. On the contrary it actually inspects the code (gathers facts about it) and matches the facts as abstraction of the implementation against the defined contracts. This form of whitebox code inspection is done by the abstract interpretation algorithm (there are other solutions like Spec# that do real formal program verification). The advantage of static checking is that it’s able to find all possible contract violations, independent of any current values. But static checking is hard. On the one side it’s hard for the CPU to gather information about the code and to verify contracts. Hence static checking is very time-consumptive which is intolerable especially for bigger code bases. On the other side it’s hard for a developer to satisfy the static checker. To work properly static checking needs the existence of the right (!) contracts on all used components (e.g. external libraries) which is often not the case. And looking at the static checker from Code Contracts it seems to be too limited at the current development state. Many contracts cannot be verified or it’s too impractical to define contracts that satisfy the checker. Thus static checkers are a great idea to universally verify contracts, but especially in the .NET world the limitations of the checkers make them impractical for most projects. Hence a valid strategy for today is to write tests in conjunction with contracts and to validate postconditions and invariants with appropriate tests.

[To be continued…]

Comparison: DbC and TDD – Part 2

This blog post is a continuation of the comparison and differentiation between DbC and TDD. Please take a look at part 1 which covers the design aspect (and shortly specification again which has been discussed in more detail here). Today’s post takes a look at documentation and code coupling and shows commonalities and differences of TDD and DbC towards these aspects.

Documentation

One important thing for other developers to understand your code is documentation. Code comments are a first necessity here to basically explain what a code component is intended to do. But comments have the unpleasant habit to run out-of-sync with the real code if you are not carefully and consequently adapting them. Most of all if you write obligations or benefits into comments there will be no check if those requirements hold or if the real implementation matches them.

DbC with its contracts is a much better way to document those specification aspects. Contracts are coupled to the code and e.g. with Code Contracts you get static and runtime checking for them. This checked documentation makes DbC really powerful (if properly used) and avoids the asynchronicity between code and documentation. It shows developers how a component should be used, what requirements the client has to fulfill and what he can expect in return. The client can rely on these specified qualities which improves the reusability of contracted code components. Furthermore there are possibilities to integrate Code Contracts into the Sandcastle documentation and for Visual Studio 2010 there will be an add-in that immediately shows defined contracts on a component as you develop against it. With that you get great MSDN-like documentation that contains the defined contracts as well as support for your development process when you use contracted code.

Tests in terms of TDD add another aspect of documentation. Due to their exemplary nature and their specification of an element’s behavior those tests are great to show a developer the intent of a code component and give him a guideline to its usage. Since tests can be run and validated in a reproducible way developers are able to rely on defined behaviors as well.

Together with documentation comes the aspect of intention revealing. And both TDD and DbC add some value here. Both express the developer’s intention with a certain component and show far beyond code comments and naming conventions what behavior a client can expect. Developers can use the component in these specified ways and don’t have to manually investigate the component’s implementation.

Code coupling

One drawback of TDD is the locational gap between the code implementation and the tests as specification and documentation source. For sure this has an advantage as well: the code logic isn’t polluted with the specification and thus it’s kept clean. But the disadvantages weigh heavier for me. If developers want to show how a component behaves they have to cross the gap and investigate the tests. This is difficult for developers who are not very familiar with TDD. Furthermore tests don’t give any support for client usage of a component. Of course they give usage examples, but developers can use and especially misuse a component in arbitrary ways. This can lead to serious problems (e.g. inconsistent states) if there are no other mechanisms to prohibit misusage.

DbC on the other side sets contracts directly on the implementation of a code component in place. Thus they have a declarative nature and extend the definition of a code component. Some realizations of DbC like Code Contracts in .NET have drawbacks since they set contracts imperatively into the code, but rewrite the code after compilation to set the contracts in the „right“ places. Thus Code Contracts break the uniformity principle (different semantics should be expressed through different syntax) and pollute the code logic in some way. Other realizations like the Eiffel language have contracts as keywords built into the language which makes a better choice in my opinion. Anyway contracts at the same place as the implementation avoids the drawbacks of a locational gap. And moreover DbC prevents misusage of a component. Contracts are dynamically checked at runtime or statically at compile time and fail early if requirements are not satisfied. That’s a very important concept because it expresses a clear behavior if something goes wrong (existence of a bug) and gives a clear contract for obligations and benefits that hold and are checked in client/supplier communication.

[To be continued…]

Comparison: DbC and TDD – Part 1

Let’s come to another blog post in preparation of elaborating the synergy of DbC and TDD. My first blog post on this topic covered an initial discussion on specification of code elements. Thereby it has shown different characteristics of DbC and TDD in terms of code specification. Since specification is one really important aspect in comparison of DbC and TDD, it’s of course not the only one. Hence today’s blog post is a starting point for a more general comparison of DbC and TDD with some other important aspects. There are 3 more blog posts that I will come up with during the next weeks, forming a 4-part comparison series.

To say first, Test-Driven Development (TDD) and Design by Contract (DbC) have very similar aims. Both concepts want to improve software quality by providing a set of conceptual building blocks that allow you to prevent bugs before making them. Both have impact on the design or development process of software elements. But both have their own characteristics and are different in achieving the purpose of better software. It’s necessary to understand commonalities and differences in order to take advantage of both principles in conjunction.

Specification again…

The last blog post has already given a dedicated look at the specification aspect and how DbC and TDD can add some value. To summarize both principles extend the code-based specification in their own ways. TDD let’s you specify the expected behavior of a code element in an example-driven and reproducible way. It’s easy to use and allows the expression of any expected behavior. DbC on the other side sets universal contracts in place that extend the definition of a code element and are tightly coupled to it. It’s a great concept for narrowing the definition of a code element by defining additional physical constraints as preconditions, postconditions and invariants. By defining contracts on interfaces DbC strengthens the role of interfaces and enforces identical constraints/behavior over all implementations of an interface. However not every behavior can be expressed by contracts and they’re bound to a single code element. Thus they don’t lessen the position of tests, but can be seen as great complement.

Design aspect

Both DbC and TDD have impact on the design of an API. Well, there is a slight but important difference as the names imply: it’s Design by Contract, but Test-Driven Development. Thus with DbC (contract-first) on the one side you are encouraged to write your contracts as you design your components (at design phase), which perfectly fits with the idea of contracts as extension of a component’s definition. With TDD and the test-first principle on the other side you write a test which maps to a new feature and afterwards you directly implement the code to get the test to green state. Hence TDD is tightly coupled to the development phase in contrast to DbC, which seems to come first. In addition personally I wouldn’t fight a religious war on this naming. If you think of DbC as „Contract-First Development“ or „Development by Contract“ you would have the contract-first principle coupled to the development phase as well. The more important thing is to find a way to effectively use contracts in the development cycle. If you are an advocate of up-front design you would perhaps want to set your contracts at design phase. But if you intensively use TDD it would be difficult to go down this design phase road. However you would set your contracts at development phase in conjunction with the test-first principle. This leads to the question of an effective development model with TDD and DbC and that’s another important story…

But for now let’s come back to the impact of DbC and TDD to the design of an API. With TDD you write a new test for each new feature and then you bring this test to green by implementing some piece of logic. This is some form of Client-Driven Development. Your test is the client of your API and you call your methods from the client’s perspective (as a client would do). If the current API doesn’t fit your needs, you extend or modify it. Thus the resulting API is very focussed on the client’s needs and furthermore doesn’t contain code for unnecessary features, which is a great thing in terms of YAGNI. Another impact of TDD is that it leads to loosely coupled components. Tests in form of unit tests are very distinct and should be coupled to the tested component, but not far beyond that (other components that are called, e.g. data access). Thus there is a certain demand for loose coupling e.g. by DI.

With DbC and contracts on your components you have other impacts. Contracts clarify the definition and intent of your components. When you come up with contracts you strengthen your opinion about a component by setting contractual obligations and benefits. This leads to much cleaner components. Moreover your components will have fewer responsibilities (and thus a better cohesion) since it would be painful to write contracts for components with many different responsibilities. Thus DbC is great in terms of supporting the SRP and SoC. Another impact comes from the „limitation“ of contracts to support only pure methods as part of a contract. If you want to use class methods in contracts (e.g. invariants) of this class you have to keep those methods pure. This leads to the enforcement of command-query separation by contracts, which very often is a good thing in terms of comprehensibility and maintainability.

[To be continued…]

Specification: By Code, Tests and Contracts

Currently I’m taking further investments in thinking about the synergy of Design by Contract (DbC) and Test-Driven Development (TDD). This process is partially driven by my interests in Code Contracts in .NET 4.0 and other current developments at Microsoft (e.g. Pex). The basic idea I’ve got in mind is to combine DbC and TDD to take best advantage of both principles in order to improve software quality on the one side and to create an efficient development process on the other side. My thoughts on this topic are not too strong at the moment, so feel free to start a discussion and tell me what you think.

Before I come to discuss the synergy of DbC and TDD it’s absolutely necessary in my opinion to understand the characteristics, commonalities and differences of both concepts. This first blog post drives in this direction by looking at a very important aspect of both concepts: the formal and functional specification of code. It’s a starting point for further discussions on this topic (a 4–part comparison series follows). So let’s start…

Code-based specification

In essence, DbC and TDD are about specification of code elements, thus expressing the shape and behavior of components. Thereby they are extending the specification possibilities that are given by a programming language like C#. Of course such basic code-based specification is very important, since it allows you to express the overall behavior and constraints of your program. You write interfaces, classes with methods and properties, provide visibility and access constraints. Furthermore the programming language gives you possibilities like automatic boxing/unboxing, datatype safety, co-/contravariance and more, depending on the language that you use. Moreover the language compiler acts as safety net for you and ensures correct syntax.

Since such basic specification is necessary to define the code that should be executed, it has a lack of expressiveness regarding the intent of a developer and there is no way to verify correct semantics of a program with it. As an example interfaces define the basic contract in terms of method operations and data, but looking at C# a client of this interface does not see what the intent of a method is or which obligations he has to fulfill when calling a method or what state he can assume on return of a method. Furthermore interfaces can not guarantee uniform behavior across their implementations. TDD and DbC are there to overcome or at least decrease this lack of expressiveness at some points and to guarantee correct semantics.

Test-based specification

Let’s come to test-based specification using TDD (as well as BDD as „evolutional step“ of TDD). This is inevitably integrated in the TDD cycle. Every test written by a developer maps to a new feature he wants to implement. This kind of specification is functional and example-driven, since a developer defines by exemplary input/output pairs what output he expects as result of the test run under a certain input. With well-known techniques (stubs, mocks) he is able to run his tests in isolation, get reproducible test results and perform state and behavior verification.

Compared to code-based specification, test-based specification in a TDD manner is very valuable when it comes to expression of the behavior of a code element. It gives a set of tests that could at its extreme span the whole behavior of a code element. With their reproducibility the tests are indispensable when it comes to continuous integration to ensure correct behavior of modified code elements. Furthermore tests are a great source for other developers to show the intent of a developer for a method’s behavior and to give demonstration of the usage of a code element. There are other benefits and characteristics of TDD that will be discussed when comparing TDD and DbC altogether in subsequent blog posts.

An important aspect of test-based specification using TDD is that it’s done at a very granular level. For each new feature a test is written and if the present API doesn’t fit the needs, it will be extended or refactored. Thus TDD drives the API design as you go with your tests.

Contract-based specification

Another possibility for specifying code is contract-based specification in terms of DbC, thus defining preconditions and postconditions as method contract and invariants as class contract. With contracts you are able to define the basic obligations that a client must fulfill when calling a method as well as the benefits he gets in return. Furthermore invariants can be used to define basic constraints that ensure the consistency of a class. Thus with DbC a developer is able to define a formal contract for code that makes a clear statement of obligations and benefits in client/supplier communication (aka caller/callee). If a contract fails the behavior is clear as well: by failing fast the developer can be sure that there is a problem (bug) with his code and he has to fix it.

On a technical level there are several possibilities to define contracts. In Eiffel contracts are part of the programming language itself in contrast to Code Contracts that become part of the .NET framework. In any case contracts are directly bound to the code that they are specifying and express additional qualities of the code. Those qualities go beyond the code-based specification. In general contracts allow arbitrary boolean expressions what makes them a very powerful and flexible specification source. Nonetheless contracts only allow partial functional specification of a component. It can be very difficult or even impossible to define the complex behavior of a method (which methods is it calling, what business value does it have, what’s the concrete result for a concrete input, …) or to ensure certain qualities (e.g. infrastructure-related questions like „is an e-mail really sent?“) with contracts. Furthermore it’s impossible to use impure functions in contracts which would be necessary to express certain qualities of code (like expressing inverse functions: x = f^-1(f(x)), if f or f^-1 are impure). Test-based specification could be used here instead.

But let’s come back to the technical aspect: Contracts are wonderful animals in terms of extending the code-based specification by narrowing the definition of a code element and becoming part of the element’s signature. They can be used to define general conditions, e.g. physical constraints on parameters and return types. Thereby (for example with Code Contracts) the contracts can be inherited to sub-classes while respecting the Liskov substitution principle (LSP). Moreover contracts can be defined on interfaces and thus they are a valuable tool for expressing constraints and qualities of an interface that must be respected by every implementation. With that contracts are wonderfully strengthening the role and expressiveness of interfaces and complementing code-based specification at whole.

With the tight coupling to the code, contracts give immediate support for other developers how an API should be used. They express the developer’s intent (intention revealing) for his code elements, which leads to easier comprehension and usage of those components. They give some kind of checked documentation, which again greatly complements code-based specification and leads to fewer misusage of contracted components.

In contrast to test-based specification, contracts are employed at level of whole components by employing invariants to classes and pre-/postconditions to class methods. Moreover contracts lead to components with very few dependencies (promoting the SRP) since it’s difficult to write contracts for components with many responsibilities.

First conclusion

This blog post is intended to be a first preview of what I want to come up in the next time. It has given an overview of possibilities for specification of code elements with focus on test-based and contract-based specification in terms of TDD and DbC. It has shown some commonalities and qualities of both concepts. In conclusion TDD and DbC are both valuable in terms of the specification of code elements and in revealing the developer’s intent.

In my opinion it’s by no means a „one or the other“ choice. TDD and DbC act on their own terrains with their own benefits and drawbacks. There are overlaps, but in general they can naturally complement each other. It’s time to think about ways to leverage a conjunction of both concepts, isn’t it?

[To be continued…]

On ASP.NET MVC

In this article, I want to give you some information about my experiences with the Beta-version of ASP.NET MVC. During December, I had the chance to build up an application for the administration of media elements with ASP.NET MVC and thus I got a good insight in various topics.

What is ASP.NET MVC?

ASP.NET MVC is Microsoft’s interpretation of the well-known MVC architectural pattern, bringing MVC to the ASP.NET world. It is MVC for the presentation layer, not for the whole application (that should be true for most applications). Furthermore, it is not a top part of classic ASP.NET, but it’s a completely new approach for designing/creating web applications. This implies many changes and makes ASP.NET MVC very different from classic ASP.NET in many ways.

Comparison to ASP.NET „classic“

The MVC pattern follows a strict separation of concerns principle. The Model should include the business logic and is being invoked through the Controller, which is responsible for retrieving data, choosing and calling Views with that data and handling user requests. Views include only view logic and are creating/formatting the output for a user.

ASP.NET MVC tries to overcome the disadvantages of web-forms based programming by ASP.NET. Those come mainly through the purpose of ASP.NET to make web application development feel similar to win-forms based development and thus to make the access for Windows application developers more fluent. That’s a good intent, but it brings many problems to life, because we are not in a stateful Windows application, but in a stateless web environment. While classic ASP.NET developers try hard to get a good separation of concerns to work, logic is often put too much in code behind. Furthermore, ASP.NET tries to emulate stateful behavior through saving a client-based ViewState as hidden field, which can become really big and can waste page sizes. Other problems include difficult Ajax handling, missing full control over page rendering (especially when you use web-forms) and a complex page lifecycle, which is difficult to understand and to use sometimes.

I’m thinking of ASP.NET MVC as kind of „back to the roots“. For many things you have to do more handwork, where ASP.NET gives you more comfort respectively didn’t require deep knowledge of web technologies and protocols. The intent is to give you full control of the HTML markup, but it implies that you create this markup at your own. Basically, you don’t have most of the well-known ASP.NET controls. Repeater control in ASP.NET? It’s named „foreach loop“ in ASP.NET MVC 😉 . GridView in ASP.NET? Use a foreach and a HTML table in ASP.NET MVC. That sounds cruel for most developers I spoke with about this topic. In fact it’s not the whole truth. There are some so-called „helper objects“ exposed in the views, which encapsulate basic (e.g. HTML) functionality and can be used instead of the real markup. Everyone can build up his own helper methods by using standard C# extension methods and thus extend their functionality for his own needs. Currently the helper methods cover mainly basic HTML functionality like list boxes, check boxes, buttons, forms etc.. Advanced controls are missing (yet), but it’s only a matter of time when others will provide them. The community project MvcContrib has done first steps in this direction and provides a Grid control, for instance. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty nice code and shows up how controls can look in ASP.NET MVC. The fact why you can’t use most of the classic ASP.NET controls is that you don’t have ViewState and postbacks anymore. This implies that you can’t use any controls that rely on those principles. It forbids to use event based programming as well. Thus if you want to post form values back to the server, you have to create an HTML form and a controller action which can handle the POST verb. Thankfully there is a nice data binding concept, that gives you some support on dealing with this. If you want some kind of dynamic loading as can be done by event-based programming, use Ajax for that. ASP.NET MVC is introducing many new concepts as well: URL routing, TempData/ViewData, Helper objects, data binding, validation, … these are only some topics which you have to understand, if you are starting with ASP.NET MVC.

Beside those heavy changes and differences there are similarities to ASP.NET, too. Thus you are able to use the standard ASPX markup, which is available as standard view engine in ASP.NET MVC. Anyway, you can use most core ASP.NET features like authentication, role handling, Session, Caching etc..

In the whole, ASP.NET MVC gives you a much lower level of abstraction from basic HTML, which some will like and others not. Scott Hanselman got to the heart of that when he stated:

This is a not just a different tune, but a whole different band playing all new music. Not everyone will like the music, and that’s why the world has more than one band. This is a Good Thing.

I like to think of ASP.NET MVC as the raw, acoustic version of the more heavily produced and multi-layered ASP.NET WebForms we use today.

And to avoid misunderstandings: ASP.NET MVC isn’t there to replace standard ASP.NET. Instead it makes an alternative programming model and both technologies will be developed further by Microsoft in the future.

What music do you like?

To choose either ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC depends on what you want to do. Nick Berardi developed a nice decision table which guides you on your choice.

Following that and my own experiences you should use ASP.NET MVC, if you want:

test-driven development, including your UI,
separation of concerns through the MVC principle with all goods, that are implied through this (logic at places where it should be, nicer architecture etc.),
improved team development, where different team members are responsible for different parts of the UI (Models, Views and Controllers),
RESTful URLs,
multiplicity of Views (e.g. for different output devices like PC, mobile, printer, …),
full control over your markup, clean and tiny HTML pages.

ASP.NET should be used in case you want to:

be productive in a short time (RAD/prototyping),
develop data centric applications (ASP.NET MVC is not the best for that due to the missing data-centric controls (at the moment) and missing data source controls),
make use of complex web forms (includes existing 3rd party controls),
use the event model,
get a fast entrance to web application development.

My opinion

Personally I like the development in ASP.NET MVC. It gives me more freedom than classic ASP.NET and I feel more home in there. ASP.NET MVC is in my opinion a step in the right direction. The loosely coupled components give you the flexibility to exchange or extend parts of the framework as well as to fake things out and test parts of your code separately. A main point that Microsoft has done right is to include the community in the development process and to consider their needs. The open source community project MVCContrib shows this direction of actively including the community. Furthermore, ASP.NET MVC comes with jQuery, built-in jQuery support and jQuery intellisense. Microsoft promises to support jQuery and to contribute improvements back into the jQuery development in the future. That’s a huge turnaround for Microsoft, which was fighting Open Source heavily not long ago. I think, other development teams at Microsoft should follow this example. For instance, the ADO.NET team has created so much distrust while developing the Entity Framework at its current state and it’s not much caring about community needs. Guys, time to re-think!

On the other hand, there are many things for you to dislike ASP.NET MVC. Through the lower level of abstraction and the missing ASP.NET controls you could miss some kind of comfort while creating your web applications. Furthermore, there is no direct „upgrade path“ for learning ASP.NET MVC if you have developed ASP.NET so far. For beginners in web-based application development, there is a very steep learning curve, because you have to be aware of the stateless programming model and basic technologies like HTML, CSS, HTTP and so on.

One thing to mention is that ASP.NET MVC is still in development. At this time, the RC has been released and V1 will follow in February 2009. For me and many others, ASP.NET MVC V1 is not a complete framework out-of-the-box, it’s more a basic framing which doesn’t limit developers in most things. It gives them the freedom and possibilities to realize their own opinions and principles. Phil Haack got the point:

In part, you can look at v1 of ASP.NET MVC as a Framework for building ASP.NET MVC Frameworks.

That’s a thing which I can truly sign. And it’s leading the future development. In my opinion there will come developers and build up their own frameworks on top of ASP.NET MVC, making them more narrow and including their own principles. And ASP.NET MVC allows them to do this. Moreover, that is why the ASP.NET MVC developers didn’t make their framework very opinionated. At every point there are many degrees of freedom and some people are frustrated about that, because it allows everyone to create bad code. But it’s a good thing, if others come and make their frameworks on top of ASP.NET MVC really opinionated. It’s easing the way for those people and thus I’m applauding the ASP.NET MVC team. I’m really happy to see this bare framework to come out and I’m interested to see what will have been developed in spproximately one year. For now, I’m really confident of that.