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xUnit.net - Next Generation of Unit Testing Frameworks?
Jim Newkirk, creator of NUnit, has announced a new Unit Testing Framework called xUnit.net. The proclaimed successor to NUnit is supposed to get rid of NUnit's mistakes and shortcomings and add some best practices and extensibility to the framework.
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Ted Neward's thoughts on Architecture Roles & Responsibilites
Ted Neward shares his thoughts on the roles and responsibilities of the Software Architect, discussing what an architect does, how to approach the role, and if architects are still relevant.
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Software Development Insurance
The motion picture industry insures completion of their motion pictures via a performance bond, where an insurance company guarantees satisfactory completion of a project by a contractor. Laurent Bossavit ruminated on what it would take to do the same for software project.
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David M. Kean Reveals Microsoft's FXCop Ruleset
FXCop has a lot of code analysis rules, but does Microsoft actually use them all? Turns out the answer is no. David Kean lists which FXCop rules are considered mandatory by the Microsoft's Developer Division.
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A case study of Apache peer/code review processes
Peter C. Rigby and Daniel M. German have released a case study of peer/code review processes used at Apache which looks at the types of reviews, frequency of them, and other characteristics. Although some question the data collection methodology, the papers offer an interesting set of discussions comparing and contrasting various review methodologies.
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Book Excerpt: How to Improve your Continuous Testing
Continuous Integration has become a standard development best practice - but it's not always done well. Tests take up much of an application's build time, and poorly constructed test suites can cause long builds, whereupon teams start to circumvent agreed-upon CI practices just get the time to code. InfoQ presents advice and examples in Chapter 6: Continuous Testing from a new CI book.
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Does software design really pay off?
Many developers have encountered a situation where they’ve been asked to cut down on design and "just get the job done". Martin Fowler presented his doubts about this strategy and explained trading design quality for speed is illusory for projects longer than just a few weeks.
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Article: Implementing Automated Governance for Coding Standards
Most development organizations of a significant size have some form of coding standards and best practices. Simply documenting these standards and keeping them up to date can be a significant challenge and enforcing them even harder. Our organization has found that enforcing coding standards and best practices in an automated fashion through our build process has been highly effective.
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SQL Server Best Practices Analyzer No Longer Tied to Service Packs
According to Paul Mestemaker, the SQL Server Best Practices Analyzer is no longer being tied to SQL Server Service Pack releases. This announcement is being made in conjunction with the first production release of the tool.
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Agile, Architecture and the 5am Production Problem
What does "just enough architecture" mean? Can we agree on this? The answers from FDD and XP seem divergent. Michael Nygard, author of Release It! unravels the story of a production problem which typical Agile approaches would not have prevented, asserting that Agile teams may need to attend more to architecture, if they want to sleep through the night once it's deployed in the real world.
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Presentation: Code Organization Guidelines for Large Code Bases
Structuring a large code base maintained by multiple teams working in parallel can be a real challenge. If you are not disciplined about code structure overtime you will end up with a tangled, unmaintainable mess. In this session Juergen Hoeller provides general guidelines on packaging and package interdependencies, layering and module decomposition, and evolving a large code base.
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Fun: New Programmatic Certification - WOMM Programme
Jeff Attwood outlined a new programmatic Certification programme, WOMM (Works On My Machine), as an humorous mechanism for highlighting broken builds in a continuous build environment.
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Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Agile compatibility
Design in the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) world involves working with the user to understand the problem and come up with a user interface – typically on paper - of the entire system before turning it over, in Big Design Upfront (BDUF) manner, to the rest of the development team to build. So how can Robert Biddle claim that HCI has home-grown practices that are very similar to those of Agile?
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Article: Unit-Testing XML
In this exclusive InfoQ article, Stefan Bodewig explains how to use the XMLUnit Java framework to write tests in the presence of XML.
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100% Test Coverage?
How much testing is enough? The answer varies depending on whom you ask. On one end of the spectrum, some say you should strive to achieve 100% test coverage. Others say it doesn't matter, that you should just rely on the quality of the tests, and that measuring test coverage does not tell you anything about the quality of the tests and the code being tested.