Category: Software Development

Your brain on design pattens

Picked up my copy of Head First Design Patterns today (I’d ordered it in a couple of weeks ago). So far I’m loving it.

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Text files, test data, and the Jakarta Commons BeanUtils

Earlier, I wrote about testing only one thing at a time. A little one-liner I tossed out in that was using text files to load object graphs in your test cases. I thought I’d elaborate on that a bit more.

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Testing pattern: don’t test too much at once

This has been said before, I know, but it’s worth re-iterating: a test should test one thing, and one thing only.

First, some scope definition. Using Kent Beck’s terminology, I’m talking about developer tests, not acceptance tests. Also, by one thing, I mean that there should be only one thing that breaks the test (which is very different from saying any failure should only break one test…). In addition, the one thing that breaks should provide diagnostic information – a test failure shouldn’t leave you scratching your head to determine the immediate cause

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Interfaces are interesting…

Cedric’s got an interesting post on obtaining extensibility via interfaces As usual, he makes a lot of very good points, and (again, as usual when I link to Cedric’s posts), there are a couple that I think could be elaborated on.
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Testing patterns: don’t assert without cause

One thing that I see a lot of with JUnit tests are “cascade failures”. That is, one change causes lots of tests to break. This is often (not always) associated with tests that assert things they shouldn’t.

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Learn in the quiet times

I had a comment lodged on an older article recently. The poster was complaining about the poor quality of the JWebFit sub-project of JWebUnit In particular, he was complaining about how it meant their project wasn’t delivered on time. There’s an anti-pattern here.
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I’m not a Hungarian Notation user

Joel Spolsky wrote an interesting article which had a brief history of Hungarian notation, amongst other things. Cedric Beust’s picked it up and made the claim that We are all Hungarian Notation users. I’m not buying it.
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