Extreme Programming With Power Builder

Just curious if there are any other masochists out there ExtremeProgramming with PowerBuilder 7 and if you'd care to swap war (or horror) stories with our group (LockheedMartinResearchAndDevelopment)? -- LoganGraves?

Not yet, but we use Powerbuilder quite heavily, and hope to take the XP plunge on an upcoming project. We also have a substantial amount of logic in the backend database as Transact-SQL, which will make things even more interesting. My fear is that XP will be crushed by the monolith of our code base. Stay tuned. -- BillMorrow

We are doing an XP project using PowerBuilder in our ExtremeProgrammingLab. To accomplish it we did the following:

The parts of XP that we could implement worked great. We have a lot of unit tests (including tests for the mapping layer). All the other design and coding parts of XP have worked for us. We have done user stories on cards, test first programming, small iterations, pair programming (although there are only two of us so we never get to switch pairs), etc, etc. The only part that has not worked well is the functional testing. Our QA person who was going to implement the functional tests in Rational Robot had problems dealing with changes to the UI and so did not continue with them. Now we have no automated functional tests and have found on occasion that they would have been useful.

We are using 6.5. We have tried to go to 7.0, but there have been to many problems. I recently did tried using C3 to do a simple PFC based prototype. It was quite unstable. I ended up reverting back to 6.5. What I found especially troubling was the fact that every time I changed an ancestor object, I had to regen all decendents or things would crash. This would make OO programming especially difficult.

Update: When this project went into maintenance, the developer who made changes to it did not keep the tests up to date so I've now dropped them completely. <sigh>

-- JohnUrberg

Have to agree with you on the PB 6.5 vs. 7.0x situation. We have encountered far too many dll-level errors in our existing (& formerly-working) PB 7 apps (including those of a non-XP nature). And owing to what we laughingly call, "PowerBuilder Tech Support," the switch from 6.5 to 7.0 has roundly been deemed a bad move by all parties concerned.

As a result, we have dropped our PB XP project in favor of a Perl/PB implementation of XP. (See: LockheedMartinResearchAndDevelopment for all of the gory details.)

-- LoganGraves?

Has anyone else had any luck using Rational Robot/RobotJ in an XP environment?

-- JoeParks?

PB stinks as ever! It is simply unusable! Put it in garbage if you can afford!

EditText of this page (last edited November 10, 2004)
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