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 first break of the CI build on a new team came about two weeks into starting the new job. We had made a small change to a dynamically created URL on a single page of the application. Normally this would fall into the category of “too simple to test” for me. My pairing partner [...]

My default rule with mocking is to try to stick to stubs where possible. I don’t enjoy having to setup and verify interactions with mocks, but sometimes you have some code where that’s exactly what you need to do. I’ve used many frameworks in Java over the years from EasyMock to Mockito, but I was [...]

On a recent project I ran into issues with testing controllers in Grails. Starting test first, I spent some early time figuring out how much support there was out of the box for unit testing Grails domain classes and controllers. I setup Spock as a plugin and plunged in. I was dealing with a legacy [...]

I gave a presentation on Spock a very nice BDD framework in Groovy a few months back to our Groovy Users Group in Sacramento. After using it on a real world Grails project the last few months it has grown on me to become my go to testing framework for Groovy/Grails or Java projects. A [...]

I’ve been meaning to put together an example of all the Hamcrest assertions that have been added to JUnit 4 way back in 2007 now. My assumption based on a number of recent client engagements is that if unit testing is being done with JUnit the default is still to rely on assertEquals() as the [...]

The image above probably needs a bit of explanation. After having a lingering todo I finally made a donation and requested a Green Clean Code band from Uncle Bob Martin. I was at a talk of his at SD West 2005. At that point he pointed out a rubber band he was wearing that he [...]

Michael Feathers wrote a tough post recently on UI testing tools. The fact of the matter is that UI based testing should be used for UIs: that’s it. You should not be testing your full application end-to-end through a UI Testing tool. First of all, that sort of testing couples some of the most important [...]

I came across a note of mine from last year on my baseline expectations for developers: All code is checked into source control on an hourly basis or at most daily. Every project has an automated build. (Maven, Ant) All projects are setup in continuous integration (Hudson) All code follows the current Java/Groovy coding standards. [...]

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 [...]