Unit Test Saga

It's been almost a month since I last posted! I think it's partially due to the fact that I haven't had much interesting work to talk about. Mostly I've been frustrated in trying to convince my teammates why automated unit testing is important (and how to better use our horrible source control system). Most of the objections are the familiar "we'll be writing more test code than application code", "how can we test what we haven't written yet", "it takes too long", etc. I think I've finally convinced them of the benefits though, and we're starting to write automated tests! I'm hoping I can now introduce Test Driven Development and convince them to start writing their tests before the code.

I came across a podcast last week from Net Objectives that does a much better job of explaining the benefits of Test Driven Development than I ever could. I thought it was great and I hope it's useful to others as well.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I Believe...

A recent reorg at my company left me with a new manager - and a different approach to software development than my team had been previously following.  Our new approach is one that I don’t necessarily agree with, but it led me to think about - and reevaluate -  those tenets of software development that I think are important and that I believe lead to increased quality and productivity. This post will consist of fairly high level discussions about how to organize code, teams, and projects - but contain very little actual code. Many of these ideas will not be my own.  They are mostly ideas I’ve learned from others and their willingness to share their experiences with me.  They are, however, ideas that I’ve practiced and hardened as I’ve worked to build my own ideal environment for delivering value through software . Many of these ideas I now take for granted as commonplace (even though they aren’t).  I felt a need to document them anyway - so people can understand what to expect (a
Read more

FRail :include

I really like developing with Rails, but I've been frustrated the last few days by some things Rails should do quite easily, yet doesn't. I've already written here and here about some of my struggles with Rails :include clause. Here's one more... Let's say you have a has-and-belongs-to-many relationship. If you :include this relationship in a find query, Rails will automatically create the join clause including the lookup table! That's cool. Unfortunately, it looks as if only the :include clause provides this piece of functionality. Why isn't the same functionality provided via the :join clause or through a general purpose module? This doesn't make any sense to me! I'm working on a database application where I don't need to display a lot of data, but the data displayed is heavily filtered by it's connections to other information in the database. I need to join a lot of tables to perform the filtering operation and using :include
Read more

Performance Tuning JCAPS - Part 2

It's been close to 2 months since my first Performance Tuning JCAPS post. Since then, we've noticed our servers running out of TCP connections under heavy load. Researching this problem, we learned that the JCAPS' JMS server makes heavy use of TCP in implementing Request/Reply queues . We approached Sun for guidance and they assured us that they've had success implementing high throughput applications using the JMS request reply solution... but how? It appears a multi-step solution is needed. First, running out of TCP connections in a scenario like ours is a JCAPS bug addressed in an ESR (110348) and rolled into JCAPS 5.1.3 Update Release 3 . We installed this update and noticed a marked improvement. Running my simple 75 user simulated test, transactions took 2521 ms to round trip (compared to the previous time of 20128ms). While this is great improvement, an average of 2.5 seconds is still really slow for this simple transaction. We reported our findings to Su
Read more