Process
Better Software Magazine Articles
Some Assembly Required Despite the hype, test-driven development is not as easy as child's play. Successful implementation of TDD requires discipline and an understanding of the potential pitfalls. This article examines the "fine print" of TDD and explains how following some guidelines can help you make it a valuable addition to your development toy box. |
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Inside SOA Building on a May 2007 Better Software magazine article by Dan North, this month’s cover story continues a look inside service-oriented architecture that emphasizes the process that defines the services rather than the technical specifics. However, this article does use standard technologies—Java, XML, SOAP, WSDL, and POX to further describe a practical implementation of the vacation-booking service described in Dan’s article. |
Arjen Poutsma
December 28, 2007 |
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What Counts? In the testing business, we are infected with counting disease–we count test cases, requirements, lines of code, and bugs. But all this counting is an endemic means of deception in the testing business. How do we know what numbers are truly meaningful? |
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Tools for Our Time Software development has really changed over the years, and programming languages have evolved along with it. Learn more about D, one of today's more interesting languages; it's a high-level, type-safe language with the efficiency of C++ and the convenience of Java. |
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A Story About User Stories and Test-Driven Development: The Setup While "testing" is part of its name, many TDD pundits insist TDD is not a testing technique, but rather a technique that helps to focus one's design thinking. Drawing on real events from the authors' combined experience, this story follows a fictional team as it encounters some of the pitfalls of using test-driven development. |
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Behind the Scenes Have you ever found a major defect while testing an unfamiliar system and been unable to explain exactly how you found it? The Framework for Exploratory Testing can help. These four activities help you explain your thought processes and allow you to train others to be better exploratory testers. |
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Buddy, Can You Paradigm? Contrary to popular belief, object orientation is not the One True Paradigm--there isn't one, each programming style has its own claim to fame, and one is not necessarily better than another. So, even more important than being proficient in multiple languages is the addition of multiple paradigms to your development arsenal. |
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How Testers Think People think in models and metaphors, which help us make sense of the world and deal with new things. Citing material from the book "How Doctors Think", Michael draws a comparison between how doctors diagnose illness in patients and how testers find problems in software. |
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Developing Your Sense of Smell With all of the resources available these days—books, blogs, Webcasts, training,—that aid us in our design, are you one of those programmers who lacks the "olfactory gene" needed to detect refactoring odors in your code? Unit testing helps you refine your sense of smell and improve your code design. |
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Transform Your Software Bring out the best in your code. Systematic code transformations are an important tool for test-driven development. Refactoring and generalization—common code transformations in TDD—improve the code while preserving its behavior and broaden the capabilities of the software. Each technique has its place, and together they help make TDD effective. |
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