Musings of a Software Development Manager

Working with my pair yesterday we ran into an issue testing a view that pulled in several partials. In the interest of making progress we punted after about half an hour of trying to setup expectations on the partials and just tested the negative cases where we didn’t have to worry about the partials being [...]

My daughter spent an hour the other day cutting holes, drawing red bricks, and pasting grass along the bottom of a simple cardboard box. It’s a common story among parents, especially of small children that despite spending a lot of money on a gift, the kid ends up enjoying the box and ignoring the toy. [...]

As a software manager and developer I’ve followed the gradual adoption of DSLs as a mainstream technique. I’ve worked with numerous DSLs including: Rails RSpec Easymock, Mockito Selenium Grails, GORM Rake Ant (as ugly as an XML DSL is) RSpec was a wonder at the time compared to JUnit 3 where I spent the bulk [...]

Not too long ago a local recruiter noted at a JUG meeting: “I don’t care what else you have on your resume, but you have to have Spring and Hibernate. I know it was all EJB and SOA just a few years ago, but now if you don’t have Spring/Hibernate you’re not getting past the [...]

A few weeks ago at the local Ruby Users Group meeting there was a suggestion of actually writing some code at the meeting. The suggestion was to use a Ruby Quiz exercise. It was quiz #16, a Rock, Paper, Scissors simulation. We broke up into small groups of about three people, coded for maybe 45 [...]

Recently I’ve been catching up with the Ruby world again in my limited spare time. I had an idea for a fun little hobby project, but I wanted to actually do it BDD style and in Rails 2. I dug a bit into RSpec again and realized they had a new BDD tool called Cucumber. [...]

I hopped over to http://rubyonrails.org about 7:40pm PST and found this surprise. After a few tries I confirmed it looks like they there’s a real issue. This is decidedly not what I was expecting. Hopefully it’s fixed soon.

Automated testing is one of the most important parts of software development, and yet until now, we haven’t mentioned it. Testing a piece of software relies on a thorough understanding of the tools you are using, and designing tests can be far more difficult (and enjoyable) than writing the code itself. – Head First Rails [...]

Some recent signs of continuous testing coming to Java land: Grails 1.1 features 9 new features including #9 Continuous Testing. Kent Beck is developing JUnit Max an Eclipse plug-in that runs tests in the background optimizing for the tests that are most likely to break. Autotest was a joy to use when I got to [...]

I haven’t really spent a lot of time with RSpec since about the 0.5 release. I took a tutorial class with Dave Astels and got jazzed about the opportunity since they were really able to leverage Ruby to make a nice BDD framework. After using RSpec all JUnit test methods started including should. The Rails [...]