BT

Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

Write for InfoQ

Topics

Choose your language

InfoQ Homepage TDD Content on InfoQ

  • QCon Panel: Modifiability - Or is there any design in Agility?

    Many people assume that agile methods mean an absence of design. Design still happens in agile projects, but it shifts from an up-front phase to a continual evolution. Design decisions should be left to the last responsible moment, but some design decisions do need to be made upfront. Martin Fowler explored this topic through a panel discussion at the last QCon.

  • Next-Generation Functional Testing

    What should the next generation of functional testing tools offer? The Agile Alliance is holding a workshop to envision the next-generation of functional testing tools, from October 11th to 12th. What do you think needs the most attention?

  • Analyzing Experimental Data Concerning Agile Practices

    Agile literature is sprinkled with experiments on the effectiveness of one or more practices. Not all experiments come to the same conclusion. Some experiments come to conclusions that may not coincide with your team’s experience. To understand experimental results, and the level of confidence that you should have in their outcomes, an understanding of a few simple evaluation criteria is helpful.

  • 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.

  • ObjectMother - a Forgotten Testing Tool

    One of the earliest techniques for writing tests using TDD did not use mocks and stubs, but used the actual business objects instead. By creating a set of factories that instantiated, composed, and executed methods on business objects, real objects, in a non-initial-state of their lifecycle, could be created for testing purposes. The name coined for this pattern was ObjectMother.

  • Presentation: System Integration Testing with Spring

    Spring provides a holistic solution that makes your application's use cases and subsystems easier to test. The emphasis is on testing outside a JEE server or container, thus greatly improving productivity. In this presentation, Spring Creator Rod Johnson discusses integration testing and the support that Spring provides for it.

  • 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.

  • Are Agile Development Practices Detrimental to Architecture and Design?

    Is iterative and incremental development à la Agile practices - where one builds only what is required per iteration - detrimental to good design? Does Scrum encourage ignoring architectural issues? Can design and architecture evolve effectively without the technical Agile practices? Does test-first development lead to good design? Or does the red-green-refactor loop stall at local-minima?

  • Writing Maintainable Code

    Sam Gentile, Oren Eini (aka Ayende), and Frans Bouma have an ongoing debate in the .NET community about how to write maintainable code, which several others have joined. The debate mainly focuses on the question, if Test-Driven-Development (TDD), O/R-Mappers (ORM), Model-View-Presenter/Controller (MVP/MVC), and other best-practices help to improve the maintainability of software.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Separating Views from Business Logic with Acropolis

    Microsoft's GUI toolkits tend to encourage developers to tightly couple business logic with presentation. Comparing the original VB and ASP or WinForms and ASP.Net, one sees very little change in this regard. Acropolis is different though, and for the first time since MFC it looks like Microsoft is taking the concept of separation of concerns seriously.

  • Microsoft and Agile - Divergent Agendas?

    Martin Fowler has questioned Microsoft's grip on leading-edge developers. MS has threatened one developer with legal action over his TestDriven.Net extension for VisualStudio Express, and MS development of an incompatible rival to NUnit has alienated many developers. Is there a widening divide between MS and the Agile community, as each pursues different a vision? Now's the time to speak up.

  • 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.

  • 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.

BT