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SEARCH KEYWORD -- TDD

  That’s Not TDD

A few months ago I was visiting a client who was having a lot of problems using TDD. “It takes over half an hour to run our unit tests,” he said. “You are not doing TDD,” I said. “In order for tests to be valuable all of them must run fast—within a few seconds, or developers will stop running tests frequently.” “But how to I make them run fast?” he asked, “Just connecting to the database takes 30 seconds” So I showed him a techn...

   TDD,Driver,QA,Model,Uncontrol,Method     2011-08-25 02:26:29

  How deep should unit test go?

There is a question on Stackoverflow which says "How deep are your unit tests?". It is asked by a guy named John Nolan. The question is not too new, but what catches me is the Best Answer given by Kent Beck, who is the creator of Extreme programming(XP) and Test Driven Development(TDD). Let's look at the question first. The thing I've found about TDD is that its takes time to get your tests set up and being naturally lazy I always want to write as little code as possible. The first thing I seem ...

   Unit test,TDD,XP     2012-09-03 10:11:27

  Testing is not a Feature

I pointed out to someone at work today that PyDev 2.5.0 now offers really cool TDD support. I’m not a huge TDD proponent or anything, but this stirred up a discussion. This guy, let’s call him John, said that â€œTDD may shorten the time it takes to develop a feature, but sometimes a feature is so urgent we may want to deliver it as quickly as possible and test it later”.Sentences like that make me weep. I tried to explain that without testing, the...

   Testing,Feature,Software testing     2012-04-24 06:30:09

  Learning Ruby and Ruby vs Lisp

The company I work for has a lot of legacy Ruby code, and as Ruby has become kind of a mainstream language, I decided to get a book about it and learn how it works. As my learning resource, I chose The Ruby Programming language by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto as that receives great customer reviews, covers Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9 and is authoritative because the language creator is one of the authors. The book makes a good read in general. There are plen...

   Ruby,Feature,Functional,OOP,Lisp,Difference     2011-12-12 07:42:01

  What Happened to Software Engineering?

Over the past few years there has been an evolutionary shift in the world of software development.  Not very long ago, the dominant Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) methodology was the Waterfall Method with very specific phases that separated the construction phase from phases like design and test. The software development industry, still very new, was striving to find a repeatable, predictable process for developing software.  The best model for this seemed to be the physical sc...

   Software engineering,Software,Developmen     2011-09-07 10:42:34

  Writing unit tests for legacy code – an open letter to developers I work with

This is an email I sent today to developers who work with me, it is exactly as I wrote it except for project and developer names which I’ve redacted. Dear Developers, S asked me a difficult question today, and I think the answer (which took me a few minutes to arrive at) is worth sharing with all developers, mainly because many of you will surely face the exact same problem especially in [maintenance and enhancement] projects. By now I think it is crystal clear that one of our non-ne...

   Unit testing,Open letter     2012-02-09 05:39:56

  On Programming Deadlines

There are a lot of differences between programming, and programming professionally. The most notorious of which, is deadlines.DeadlinesWhen you're writing code for yourself, you can spend as much (or as little time) on it as you please--but when you're writing code for other people, you've got only a limited amount of time and resources to get the job done. In my experience, this typically leads to one of two situations:You've got to extend the deadline to finish the job properly.You've got to w...

   Programming,Deadline,Transparent,Test,TODO     2011-11-01 07:10:21

  Why Software Projects are Terrible and How Not To Fix Them

If you are a good developer and you’ve worked in bad organizations, you often have ideas to improve the process.  The famous Joel Test is a collection of 12 such ideas.  Some of these ideas have universal acceptance within the software industry (say, using source control), while others might be slightly more controversial (TDD).  But for any particular methodology, whether it is universally accepted or only “mostly” accepted, there are a multitude of o...

   Software,Development,Debug,Design     2011-11-21 10:27:05

  Test-Driven Development? Give me a break...

Update: At the bottom of this post, I've linked to two large and quite different discussions of this post, both of which are worth reading... Update 2: If the contents of this post make you angry, okay. It was written somewhat brashly. But, if the title alone makes you angry, and you decide this is an article about "Why Testing Code Sucks" without having read it, you've missed the point. Or I explained it badly :-)Some things programmers say can be massive red flags. When I h...

   Test driven,Application design,tool     2011-10-17 10:19:16

  Code reviews in the 21st Century

There's an old adage that goes something like: 'Do not talk about religion or politics'.  Why?  Because these subjects are full of strong opinions but are thin on objective answers.   One person's certainty is another person's skepticism; someone else's common sense just appears as an a prior bias to those who see matters differently.  Sadly,  conversing these controversial subjects can generate more heat than light.   All too often people can get s...

   Code review,21 Centuary     2012-02-10 06:39:14

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