84 posts tagged with "programming"

Like many, when I first encountered the term "agile software development," I thought it was an excuse for a cowboy culture: low planning, low documentation, run as fast as you can and assume that each person's brilliance will take care of everything. Since it came up in the context of a very large client asking us about our methodology ("what's a software development methodology?" I asked myself), I thought I should dig into a little more. Integrating Agile Development in the Real World, by Peter Schuh, quickly showed me it is not that simple. Agile development is, in fact, all about fostering a systematic, right-sized, just-in-time development process. For me, being "agile" means embracing change instead of being locked into preconceived notions (requirements). But don't throw everything out the window either.

Executable tests are the best form of requirements documentation. They improve quality through early discovery of bugs and by fostering a more detailed "what-if" analysis: what if we have this input X? What if the user does Y?

Configuring a WCF service across security boundaries can be a tricky business, or so I learned recently. Testing went well, but the move to production failed for a WCF client/server scenario, with the client application encountering an error: SOAP security negotiation with '<myEndpointAddress>' for target '<myEndpointAddress>' failed. See inner exception for more details. Inner exception: The Security Support Provider Interface (SSPI) negotiation failed.

Follow-up to Building a Test Script Environment with C# and IronRuby, pt 1, wherein we change emphasis from coding tests in Ruby to writing them in English (Gherkin) with the help of SpecFlow.

After that October post, I managed to construct a full system/regression test suite for a key data-management application, using the combination of Ruby and C# as described. My team has been able to go through several cycles of…

We build a lot of console applications, and Windows services, that process inbound and outbound files in one way or another. Most depend on configuration data and some load (or unload) business data from a database, in addition to accessing the files. Testing these has always been a chore, to say the least: configurations change, data are deleted, and there's never enough time. After building a few rudimentary tools that have helped, necessity, and Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams, has convinced me that it is time to get serious about system/integration test automation, just as I did about unit test automation a few years ago. This is the first of a n-part series of posts on this process

Problem​

using Application Settings in a .Net project, you find that there are so many entries that some organization is needed.

Solution​

create custom, serializable data types for logical groups of settings.

Problem​

Need to move rows up and down, and from one table to another, in an HTML page.

Solution​

careful use of jQuery. There are probably many different solutions already out there, but I wanted to learn how to write one for myself. Key functions: closest, detach, append, prev, next, before, and after.

Wherein I record a few tips on the use of System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations, which I am likely to forget if I do not need to think about them again for some months…

Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce

I did not realize how much I still have to learn about writing good object-oriented (OO) code, and about hewing to a tight test driven development (TDD) methodology, before I read Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided By Tests. My education in OO and unit testing has been largely theoretical, with no time spent directly learning from experienced OO programmers; my best mentor was a COBOL coder. Books like Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software ("Gang of Four"), Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, Applying UML and Patterns: An Introduction to Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and Iterative Development, Xunit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code, and others are wonderful but have few detailed real-world business-case examples.

Moles is a powerful and useful framework for unit testing. Or was. But even then, it was overused (at least by me). But no more!

The first clue that I might need to walk away from Moles was the recent difficulty another developer was having in trying to get a unit test project up-and-running on his computer. I had installed what was current in early 2011, and he had installed the current version from last 2011. Turns out there was a significant change – the config file no longer worked. We had to update the assemblies correctly on my machine, rebuild many times, and fool around with manually removing some assemblies. It got confusing and messy. I suppose that's why MS still labeled this version as < 1.0.