Category: Unit testing

  • Unit tests are your specification

    Unit tests are your specification

    Recently a Schalk Cronjé forwarded me a tweet from Joshua Lewis about some unit tests he’d written. . @ysb33r I’m interested in your opinion on how expressive these tests are as documentation https://t.co/YpB1A3snUV /@DeveloperUG — Joshua Lewis (@joshilewis) December 3, 2015 I took a quick look and thought I may as well turn my comments…

  • Entanglement (or there’s nothing new under the sun)

    Entanglement (or there’s nothing new under the sun)

    I’ve just read The Age of Entanglement : When Quantum Physics was Reborn by Louisa Gilder. It’s a tremendous book, looking at the interplay between great physicists over the whole of the 20th century. If you want to learn about quantum physics itself, this is probably not the book for you, but if a mix…

  • Always Be Coding

    Always Be Coding

    Last night I finally got around to watching Erik Meijer’s keynote from last year’s Reaktor conference. It was called “One Hacker Way” and, while it contains much that is apocryphal – or at least wildly inaccurate – it scores over the older, more pedestrian type of keynote in two important ways: first it is highly contentious,…

  • Using SpecFlow on Mono from the command line

    Using SpecFlow on Mono from the command line

    SpecFlow is the open source port of Cucumber for folk developing under .NET. It has been compatible with Mono (the open source, cross platform implementation of the .NET framework) for several years, but most of the documentation talks about using it from within the MonoDevelop IDE. I wanted to offer SpecFlow as one of the…

  • To TDD or not to TDD? That is not the question.

    To TDD or not to TDD? That is not the question.

    Over the past few days a TDD debate has been raging (again) in the blog-o-sphere and on Twitter. A lot of big names have been making bold statements and setting out arguments, of both the carefully constructed and the rhetorically inflammatory variety. I’m not going to revisit those arguments – go read the relevant posts,…

  • Teaching TDD (TTDD)

    Teaching TDD (TTDD)

    There has been a flurry of discussion about how to teach TDD, sparked off by a recent post from Justin Searls. In it he lists a number of failures that range from “Encouraging costly Extract refactors” to “Making a mess with mocks” all of which distract attention from the concept that “TDD’s primary benefit is…

  • TDD at interviews

    TDD at interviews

    Allan Kelly posted an article on DZone this week predicting that TDD would be a required skill for developers by 2022. Vishal Biyani asked on Twitter about how one might test TDD skills, and I promised to blog about my experience of using Cyber-Dojo in interview situations. Cyber-Dojo is a browser-based dojo environment developed by…

  • When is a tester not a tester?

    When is a tester not a tester?

    No, I’m not trawling through my xmas cracker jokes. I was looking through the programme for DevWeek 2014 and both my sessions are tagged as “Test”. This is following a pattern started at ScanDev last year and followed by several other conferences at home and abroad. Why am I bothered? It’s not that I mind…