Nothing big has been going on today, although a few little things of interesting note. Better Testing Recently I’ve taken a strong interest in testing techniques and improvements, especially in the area of slow tests, as well as what can be done to improve our test coverage as well as make tests more automated and [...]
Archive for June, 2006
I Have Linux on my Laptop Again
June 26th, 2006
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I was a little bored this evening, and couldn’t get my self to concentrate at all in my attempts to get some reading done (between Domain Driven Design, my SCJP study guide, or Atlas Shrugged), so in an attempt to pass time I decided to install linux on my laptop… again. I’ve had quite a [...]
TDD’ing Blackjack: Iteration 1 complete
June 24th, 2006
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This afternoon I decided to try out the Blackjack TDD exercise again in php, and decided to go ahead and write a quick and simplistic interface to it, and put it up on my website to play around with. It was a fun waste of two hours, but what I’m happy about is that I [...]
Comparable and Comparator
June 23rd, 2006
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Wow. Every now and then when you think you know everything something just pops up and suprises you. I’ve recently been studying to take the Sun Certified Programmer certification exam and, even though I thought I knew enough to just go in and take the exam, I decided to go ahead and spend 25 bucks [...]
Verifiable Business Value
June 20th, 2006
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Sometimes when I work on completing stories for an iteration, I get a little sidetracked designing my object model a little too well that I actually impose a lot of work. For example, as I recently tried a TDD exercise using blackjack, I got a little too carried away with designing a Deck object, a [...]
What it Takes
June 14th, 2006
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Cory Foy recently blogged about how little developing software has to do with technical skills, and how much more it has to do with dealing with people… and he couldn’t be more on the point! Good software is never developed in a void, it is instead a process of collaborating with other developers, end users, [...]
Prototype Windows
June 14th, 2006
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Recently I stumbled upon Sébastien Gruhier’s excellent Prototype Window Class for javascipt and I must say… it’s quite impressive. I’ve created draggable windows in the past, but it is quite a bit of work and Sébastien’s class is a welcomed addition to those of us who like to create richer web UIs in our free [...]
This is Just Depressing
June 13th, 2006
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This evening I was browsing some of the recent posts on the amsuing thedailywtf.com and was amused by a post that detailed a certain programmer’s predecessor’s trials and tribulations trying to fulfill the requirement to”programmatically send an email in .NET” and the source control log that details the programmer’s frustration of trying to send an [...]
Creating Mocks with RMock
June 11th, 2006
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Let’s face it… one of the most important concepts (imho at least) in test driven development (and unit testing in particular) is the use of mock objects in your tests. Why are mock objects important? Well, when we examine what a unit test is, it’s a test of a unit of the software system under [...]
We Don’t Use UML in XP
June 9th, 2006
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One thing that has been bothering me a little as of late is the misguided dislike of UML I have observed amongst some XP users. As an example, at work the other day I was reading through Object Design: Roles, Responsibilities, and Collaborations (an excellent book by the way), one of my co-workers (who just [...]
