At work, we have been practising something approximating Acceptance Test Driven Development now for several months. This means that pretty much every feature of the system that a user would expect to be there, has an automated test to ensure that it really is. It has given me a whole new perspective on the value …
Tag Archives: quality
DRY up your Cucumber Steps
Update (13th Jume 2012): This is an old, old post that still gets a lot of hits. I don’t recommend this practice anymore. Instead, I recommend composing Ruby methods that carry out these actions. For more details, please see The Cucumber Book. A while back, I asked the Cucumber team for the ability to call …
“Total Programming” and the XP Team
Pair programming brings a great many benefits to a team that’s truly mastered it. Those of us who are lucky enough to have experienced working on a really effective XP team know about that almost magical thing that starts to happen when the barriers between different members of the team break down, egos and code …
Your Private Methods are None of my Business
A common sloppy mistake I see programmers making is to forget to declare a method as private when it’s only being used inside a class. This seems to happen more in Ruby, or maybe it just bothers me more because we don’t have interfaces. Rails ActiveRecord validation callbacks are a classic example where people often …
Continue reading “Your Private Methods are None of my Business”
Scrabbling up the Learning Curve
A few months ago I was at the peak of my powers. I was leading a team of ten C# developers building a huge project on Microsoft’s .NET platform. I had been working on the Windows platform for years, and there was rarely a question from the team I couldn’t answer quickly and confidently, drawing …
Come to CITCON
Some people think there is no conference for those of us who care about CI and testing, but oh yes there is. As an avid reader of this blog, I know that you, like me, realise that continuous integration and testing are to software development what the spirit level and the plumb-line are to the …
Story Driven Development – Just Another *DD?
Bryan Helmkamp, who maintains the handy little library webrat, did a talk recently at GoRuCo 2008 which explains his experiences using RSpec plain-text stories to build ruby-on-rails applications in a manner he calls ‘Story Driven Development’: Before code is written, the team produces executable scenarios for a user story.
9 Techniques to Save you from the Bug-Swamp
How many unresolved bugs are there in your system right now? Yes, yes, smarty-pants: the ones you already know about. Ten? Fifty? Two hundred? More?! I find it frighteningly common to see teams let a huge backlog of bugs build up. They set up a trusted system like Jira or Bugzilla and then use it …
Continue reading “9 Techniques to Save you from the Bug-Swamp”
Software as an Art Form
I just came across an article written five years ago by Richard Gabriel proposing a university course run along the lines of his own Master’s in Fine Arts in poetry. The idea evidently gathered some momentum at the time, but now seems to have come to a halt. What a shame. I’ve had an idea …
Casting with ‘as’ in C#
Anyone else hate this? Doofer doofer = GetWidget(widgetId) as Doofer; Then, somewhere miles away from this innocuous little line, I find that my doofer is unexpectedly null. This is a great way to introduce hard-to-trace bugs, unless of course it’s complimented with guard clauses everywhere to test for nulls, which most of the time means …