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I am 99% sure I have had a post like this in the past, but my google-foo was weak today and I could not find it. Do not let anyone blow smoke up your back side, testing is expensive, testing takes time but most importantly testing can help improve the quality of your code. If you are going to spend...
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If you find yourself using reflection in your unit test to push 'stub’ data into it your test just may smell. Now there are times (especially when dealing with legacy code) that you need use reflection to crack open a class to push/pull values but I would strongly suggest you consider the solutions...
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I am a little bored so I thought I would write a nice fluent interface around the Performance Counter crap that is part of .net. I know, I know the world does not really need another Fluent Interface around something, but I am bored and this is keeping be busy while waiting for my flight. Anyway...
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Part of my job at work is to teach and mentor other developers on our team. Right now I am in the process of teaching two of our developers how to create unit tests (notice I did NOT say integration tests because most anyone can do those). We are also learning how to create our tests by utilizing an...
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In my last post ( here ) I was giving a wrap up of the Mocking session I recently did at TriNug . In that post I gave some of the reasons (sorry, I meant excuses) people gave for not doing any type of automated testing during their dally development ritual (notice I am staying away from TDD at this point...
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I'm giving a talk on TDD at our local UG tonight, and under the influence of some recent posts here on devlicio.us, I just finished reworking my presentation. This post is an outline for the first half of my presentation. The Problems Code has entropy. That is over time it deteriorates. At least...
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While putting together one of my last posts one thought kept scrolling through my head. This was the idea that when you modify your code, you need to make sure your that the intent of your tests still are correct. I know this concept may seem trivial, but how many of us actually do this....
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Anyone that is a practitioner of testing or specially TDD knows that the quality of your tests are a direct measure in the assumed quality of your tested code. Better put, if your tests suck, you can assume very low quality from your code. So what is harder, writing quality code or writing quality...
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How many times as developers have we made list of things we needed to work on. Most of the time they are 'tasks' in some sort of task management system. However, we do not have one of these such systems at work. So I decided to use 'ignored' tests as my tasks. ...
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Test first Test during Test after Answer, Test. No matter what style of testing you believe in, they all share one common trait. They all test your code. So, what is the point of this post you may ask? Simple. To me, it does not matter how your tests come to be, but having tests is what is important...
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A buddy of mine decided to finally give testing a try (not true TDD, but still writing tests) and he made me laugh by some of the statements/observations he made. Where do I start? This feels weird! Am I doing this right? How much is enough? When he mentioned these to me I had to laugh. Why, not because...
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Recently I was chatting with a friend of mine and he asked if a single developer could be successful following TDD on a team that does not follow TDD. My simple answer was YES, they can. But there are a few things you must consider..... How can they make a difference I am a firm believer that someone...
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Over on the Alt.Net mailing list ( here ) the topic of where to put your unit tests was the hot topic a few days ago. This is a topic that I have debated with various people over the past few years. With all the debates I have had, it is clear to me that there really is no right or wrong way do to this...
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I'm sure that everyone has heard the riddle ' If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?' . This riddle is all about observation and knowledge of reality. Well, I have a riddle for software teams following TDD. 'If a build fails and no-one fixes...
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Recently I was asked about backing in unit tests into an existing project. In particular I was asked A) was possible and B) is it worth it. In short my answers to both these are Yes and Yes. However, backing in unit tests is not without its challenges. I thought today I would go express my experiences...