Testing Reflections

I have often said something like #8220;We found a hundred bugs!#8221; Lots of people have heard me say it. Statements like that are very valuable to me. But we should ask some vital questions about them.Consider Raisin Bran cereal. If you lived in America and weren#8217;t in solitary confinement during the 80#8217;s an 90#8217;s you [...]

Jason Gorman quickly illustrates how to apply the Collapse Heirarchy refactoring to eliminate a lazy subclass

Lazy classes add little value for the maintanance burden they incur. In this example, Jason Gorman illustrates how to safely inline a lazy class into its containing class.

p Have you seen the network/bandwidth caps that a href="http://www.rackspacecloud.com"Rackspace/a places on their cloud servers? /p p From the a href="http://cloudservers.rackspacecloud.com/index.php/Frequently_Asked_Questions"Rackspace Cloud Server FAQ/a: /p blockquote p "Your Cloud Server has a bandwidth cap that is applied in relation to the size of the server. Please note that the bandwidth caps are placed on outbound bandwidth only. Inbound bandwidth is not capped." /p

p I just started a new discussion group for WebInject: a href="http://groups.google.com/group/webinject"http://groups.google.com/group/webinject/a /p p The old forums (a href="http://www.webinject.org/cgi-bin/forums/YaBB.cgi"http://www.webinject.org/cgi-bin/forums/YaBB.cgi/a) have been broken for several years. I will leave them up in read-only mode, but some threads are broken and unviewable. /p

I've started a new series on my blog... it's a weekly diary of what it's like to work with youDevise as a developer. I thought it might prove interesting to those considering working there in the future... since they are frantically hiring.br / br / You can read the a href="http://antonymarcano.com/blog/category/being-a-youdevise-developer/"diary on my new blog/a.br / br / Wondering a href="http://antonymarcano.com/blog/2010/07/my-new-blog/"why I have a new blog?/a

p [a href="http://membase.org/"Membase/a is a high-performance, distributed key-value database (NoSQL)] /p p To check operational stats of your Membase server/cluster, you can use the telnet interface (port 11211) and issue the stats command to any individual node: /p pre $ telnet 192.168.12.11 11211 stats /pre p The output is unsorted and a little difficult to read at quick glance. /p

pby Alberto Savoia/ppI first posted this article a few years ago on the a href="http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=204677"Artima Developer /awebsite; but the question of what's adequate code coverage keeps coming up, so I thought it was time for a repost of a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/69769/TheWayOfTestivus"Testivus wisdom/a on the subject./p

Finally! You took your time, Jason!br / br / img src="http://parlezuml.com/softwarecraftsmanship/images/sc2010_logo.jpg"/br / br / Yes, a href="http://www.softwarecraftsmanship.org.uk"Software Craftsmanship 2010/a is open for business. You can register with your credit/debit card online for the jolly reasonable price of 85 quid. And, even better, all the profits from registration are going directly to help Bletchley Park.

p a href="http://code.google.com/p/corey-projects/source/browse/trunk/python2/memcached/memcached_stats_rrd.py"memcached_stats_rrd.py/a is a script for monitoring and graphing stats from Memcached or Membase. /p p Memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, and Membase is the related key-value database management system. Both are open source, with packaged/commercial versions distributed by a href="http://www.northscale.com/"NorthScale/a. They both use the memcached protocol for communication, so this script will work against a vanilla memcached installation, or against a membase server/cluster. /p

When two classes exhibit an unhealthy fascination with each other's bits, we call the Inappropriate Intimacy. It's essentially bi-directional feature envy. In this video, Jason Gorman demonstrates hot to change a bi-directional relationship into a uni-directional relationship and eliminate the feature envy on both sides.

By James A. WhittakerI've had more than a few emails about "antenna-gate" asking me to comment and suggesting clever, stabbing rebukes to a fallen competitor. I might aim a few of those at my own team in the future, some were genuinely funny, but none of them will appear here. Instead I offer first a word of caution and second a reflection that my Mom used to intone whenever disaster occurred around her. It's called "counting your blessings."

When I use TestNG for my Selenium tests, I really like the BeforeSuite and AfterSuite annotations because then I can share a Selenium session amongst the tests. With nested JUnit suites I can achieve a similar effect, and I can also go some way to grouping my tests to make it easier to create browser [...]

Switch statements are bad from an OO design standpoint. Not only because they're basically big nested IF statements, but because they have a tendency to grow. A refactored switch statement would exploit polymorphism, which is the OO way to make decisions about how to do specific "stuff" at run time.br / br / Jason Gorman demonstrates how he refactors a simple switch statement into a polymorphic OO solution (like the Strategy Pattern).

Just a quick reminder about the amazing deal I'm offering - never to be repated - which ends this weekend with the final TDD master class of the summer.br / br / Book a place on the TDD and Refactoring master classes, and your place on the OO design workshop on August 21-22 will be absolutely FREE.br / br / Each course normally costs £799, so you'll make a saving of £2000 if you book all on all three before midnight tomorrow.

When we see fields that always seem to be used together (e.g., passed together as mathod parameters, or used together in methods), this gives a strong indication that these fields really belong in their own class.br / br / Jason Gorman (yes, that's me) illustrates how to refactor a data clump by extracting a class containing those fields and then moving the behaviour that accesses them into the new class.

We all gripe and moan about how hard it is to get our customers to "go Agile" and play their role effectively. And it's an important role. Indeed, ithe customer is the key to Agile/i.br / br / br / We have a hard sell on our hands changing the customer's mindset to embrace Agile values. But when it's the other way around - which, of course, it very rarely is - the customer doesn't have to do much to pretty much force teams to be Agile.

p I met a person working as a test contractor on a project recently who said to me: "There are no requirement documents so therefore I cannot write test scripts. And this means, I cannot test." /p p I've heard this before from other test contractors. I don't understand the logic being applied. /p p I tilted my head and was speechless. I thought I should keep listening to see if I could better understand. But I didn't. In this case, it seemed the tester believed the only way to approach testing was to read and review requirements, write test scripts, and then execute test scripts. Since this one approach was not an option in the environment at that time, the tester felt dead-ended with his work. /p

When a method on one class develops an unhealthy fascination with the features of one of its collaborators, this creates unnecessarily high coupling and is an indicator that this behaviour really belongs on the collaborating class.

pThe 26th Test Management Forum will take place on Wednesday 28 July 2010 at the conference centre at a href="http://www.ballsbrothers.co.uk/minster/"strongBalls#39;s Brothers, Minster Pavement./strong /a/ppThe meeting is sponsored by our patrons: a target="tmf" href="http://www.sqs-uk.com"strongSQS UK/strong/a and a href="http://www.origsoft.com/"strongOriginal Software/strong/a and a href="http://www.tricentis.com"Tricentis Technology amp; Consulting/a and as usual, is strongFREE/strong to attend./p