What is Behavior Driven Develpoment ?

Behavior Driven Management strives to ensure that all the people in the software chain, including developers, QE, analysts, and product management all speak the same language. There have been a number of efforts in this direction, taking it forward from TestDrivenDevelopment and AcceptanceTestDrivenPlanning. Read more at this link.

BDD relies on the use of a very specific (and small) vocabulary to minimise miscommunication and to ensure that everyone – the business, developers, testers, analysts and managers – are not only on the same page but using the same words. For people familiar with the concept of DomainDrivenDesign, you could consider BDD to be a UbiquitousLanguage for software development.
It must be stressed that BDD is a rephrasing of existing good practice, it is not a radically new departure. Its aim is to bring together existing, well-established techniques under a common banner and with a consistent and unambiguous terminology. BDD is very much focused on “Getting the words right” and this focus is intended to produce a vocabulary that is accurate, accessible, descriptive and consistent.
In fact “Getting the words right” was the starting point for the development of BDD, and is still very much at its core, but the power of getting the words right has led to some insights and extrapolations that have helped us to better understand our approach and to extend it.

Tips for growing organic food - 1

Organic food has a lot of promises. At the very base level, organic food meets the expectation of people that their food be grown without a fertilizer and chemical cocktail. In organic farming, some of the concepts revolve around food growing practices that rely on crop rotation, green manure, compost, biological pest control, and mechanical cultivation to maintain soil productivity and control pests. Some of the practices that are strictly excluded include limiting the use of synthetic fertilizers and synthetic pesticides, plant growth regulators, livestock feed additives, and genetically modified organisms. Demand for organic food has grown massively.
What are some of the tips that one should follow when attempting to start the process of growing organic food.
1. Be convinced about not using weed killers and pesticides to your garden. If you are not convinced, then there is no point in going organic.
2. When starting out, do not plant in areas close to walls or fences. Such areas could be contaminated by paint, heavy chemicals, metals, etc.
3. Search for areas in your garden that received sun or are in partial shade the year round.
4. Clean the entire area, including removing earlier plants (if starting out organic the first time). Use a shovel if necessary to remove the roots from earlier plants.
5. Get into the habit of using organic compost material (learn how to prepare compost - an excellent growth material for the soil)
6. Prepare the garden by spreading leaves / already prepared compost all over your garden. This ensures that your garden gets its fill of organisms that are beneficial to it.
7. Once you have spread the compost / leaves / other such organic material over the soil of the garden, turn the top soil over, mixing the soil with the organic material so as to make sure that the top layer of the soil is very rich.
8. Water the soil frequently so as to make sure that it remains damp (not a flowing river though); this ensures that organisms get a good environment to propagate in
9. Do not take steps that could harden the soil - this includes stepping on the soil yourself, or moving heavy objects on the soil.
10. Learn about crop rotations for getting different sorts on nutrients in the soil.
This is it for this post. In the next post, there will be more details on how to get a good organic garden up and running.

Composting tips - what works and what does not

For those people who are able to successfully create a compost pile, there is nothing like it; however for those who are not able to or fail in this attempt, there can be numerous reasons. Following are some tips on failure causes as well as what to do:

Drainage: Good drainage is essential. One solution for this is to have the base of the bin somewhat open so that excess water can flow out. This gap will also allow more microbes and insects to move in and out.

Accelerators: To get a pile started faster, use something called a compost accelerator. This is material that should be high in nitrogen - ideal things are human urine, blood meal, alfalfa meal, compost from a previously completed pile, manure, all these made good accelerators.

Water: Water in a pile is critical. A lot of failures to form compost happens when either the pile is dry or too wet. The definition of the desired level of water in a pile is: "Looks moist like a sponse that has been wrung-out", but this is not something that is easily measured. You need to have some understanding of the water levels of some of the ingredients of a pile. Some of the materials contain much water than seems evident.
Fresh materials such as grass, fresh leaves, vegetable wastes, manure, hay, kitchen scraps, etc contain far more water than seems evident. Fallen and dry leaves are browns that contain lower amounts of water. If you pile seems too wet, then you need to turn it out, mix it and add some brown materials that have less water. On the other hand, if the pile seems to heat up too much and then stops, then you need to add water.

Nitrogen content: Not enough nitrogen will lead to the pile stopping. You need to add items that have high nitrogen content - fresh green material such as grass, wastes, fresh green leaves, etc have a lot of nitrogen.

Newsprint: People have been warned of newspapers containing toxic or non-biodegradable materials, but that has reduced significantly. Shredded newsprint is useful for the compost.

Shredding: Shredding means that you have smaller particles in the compost, which means more surface area for the microbes to work through, and a faster pile.

Soil: Add some finely dispersed soil in the pile, since the soil comes with a lot of microbes and worms that are very important for the compost pile.

Areration: Aeration in this case means that the pile gets a lot of air (oxygen). The pile needs to be loosened with a fork so that air gets to the different parts of the pile. In addition, you can push bars down to the bottom of the pile so that air gets to inside the pile.

Measure the temperature: Keep a soil temperature to measure the temperature of the pile at frequent intervals. When the temperature of the pile falls to below 40 degress Celsius, then turn the pile. The temperature should be between 50 and 60 degrees Celsius.

Using manure: Manure can form an important part of any compost pile. Use manure from any animal that is not a carnivore. Avoid using manure from commercial farms since the animals are fed a mixture of antibiotics.

Odours: If you compost pile has an unpleasant odor, then it is either too tightly packed, over-watered or has too much nitrogen. You should add some materials high in carbon content such as grass clippings, straw to the pile.

The art of Sautéing

You must have heard of the term, to Sauté, in terms of cooking. What does the term mean ?
Sautéing is a method of cooking food that uses a small amount of fat in a shallow pan over relatively high heat. Unlike pan-searing, sautés are often finished with a sauce made from the pan's residual fond. Sauter means "to jump" in French — The method includes flipping the food in the air. You can use a skillet or saute pan, but make sure it is big enough to comfortably contain what you are cooking.
Preheat it--you need high heat when sautéing to cook ingredients quickly; otherwise the internal moisture tends to push to the surface and your ingredients won’t brown.
Food that is sautéed is usually cooked for a relatively short period of time over high heat, with the goal of browning the food while preserving its color, moisture and flavor. This is very common with more tender cuts of meat, e.g. tenderloin, pork chops, or filet mignon. Sautéing differs from searing in that the sautéed food is thoroughly cooked in the process. One may sear simply to add flavor and improve appearance before another process is used to finish cooking it.
Olive oil or clarified butter are commonly used for sautéing, but most fats will do. Regular butter will produce more flavor but will burn at a lower temperature and more quickly than other fats due to the presence of milk solids.