In a previous entry, I noted that I am beginning to work on NBuilder again. As I am starting a new, I am trying to be quite disciplined in adhering to the principles of XP and TDD. (I hope to be critical and consider if I follow these principles as well as I presume to.) So, in order to provide a monitoring and reflection mechanism for myself, I will try to diligently blog my thoughts.

These are my primary goals:

support testing

I want to use ideas like ObjectMother so that I can have data driven / dependent tests run fast (under 1 minute rather than more than 20)

persist objects easily

This one is hard. There is tension between making constraints on objects, aggregation methods, and attributes and simplicity of the framework. On one hand, I want the objects (and their needs) drive the model and then deal with their persistence. On the other, I want to reuse tools rather than re-craft and I want to eliminate the tedious code that can accompany implementing persistence support.

support extensions

I'd rather have a small basis to reuse and tailor on a case by case basis than a bloated tool that doesn't fit any actual context well.

There is one significant requirement / motivator for NBuilder, that I don't want to make a core goal but is in the back of my mind. I would like the persist the objects with different mechanisms, such as XML vs. a relational database. One of the practical drivers have been the need to refactor and tune database schemas, be it for performance or space consideration.

There are a variety of other specific features in mind, but I don't want to clutter my thinking, get ambitious or do much anticipating. I want the vision to be simple.