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More Reasons Why Integration Tests Can Be More Important Than Unit Tests: Over at CodeBetter, Patrick Smacchia (the NDepend dude) recently has blogged a couple of posts about “Tests Driven Development” (not sure if the extra ‘s’ is supposed to signify something important or if that’s just what he calls it). I’ve written at other times about why I’m not a big fan of TDD so won’t go through all of that blah blah blah here, but some more events at clients have re-iterated to me why Integration Tests are often much more important than unit tests. Patrick talks about using code contracts as integral, and I agree with...; posted @ Friday, July 16, 2010 9:47 PM | Feedback (0)

A forthcoming comparison between SpecFlow and StoryTeller: Jeremy Miller has finally released the 1.0 version of StoryTeller, and the timing for me turns out to be fortuitous (I think that means ‘pretty good’…). From Jeremy’s own description: StoryTeller is a tool for creating and using “Executable Specifications” against .Net systems. StoryTeller could be called a Behavior Driven Development tool depending on which of the billion definitions of BDD you subscribe to, but is very much optimized for customer facing tests. I meant StoryTeller for the older ideas of Acceptance Test Driven Development that predate BDD. SpecFlow is another tool that I’ve been looking...; posted @ Wednesday, July 07, 2010 10:47 PM | Feedback (0)

RavenDB, and a brief design philosophy discussion with Ayende: Suppose you design a system that is chock full of interfaces, specifically things like some version of IRepository, where you have the ability to change out your backing store/database more easily. A common criticism of this sort of design is that it is unrealistic to think you actually will change your main backing store/database in a production system. My own experience is that while it does happen (a current client project I am working on involves changing the backing database for a set of applications from SQL Server to Oracle, for instance), it doesn’t happen often, and you often...; posted @ Friday, May 21, 2010 7:44 PM | Feedback (0)

Code cannot and should not replace technical documentation: I’ve written recently about technical documentation and the good and bad about it. Over at ElegantCode, new member John Sommez has started out with some posts about eliminating comments from code, and most recently, about how unit tests can replace the need for technical documentation for developers working on a system. I would go ahead and read what he has to say. It’s well-written, and he’s obviously given some thought to the topics. Unfortunately, I think the advice he gives is wrong, and would like to explain why. As developers, we almost always run into the problem...; posted @ Tuesday, April 27, 2010 11:53 PM | Feedback (0)

NoSQL is the new Black: No one really talks about alt.net anymore. In my mind, that’s a good thing. Though some people apparently had different goals for all of that (setting up a foundation or some other silly thing), for other people, it was about taking the things that a small subset of .NET developers were doing and making them more mainstream (whatever that means). Though (again) it is hardly a definitive sign of anything, the fact that people like Jeremy and Ayende have been publishing articles in MSDN (and no one thinks this is odd) is a good thing. That Asp.NET MVC has unit...; posted @ Tuesday, March 30, 2010 10:19 PM | Feedback (2)

CQRS Presentation, Chicago Alt.NET, 1/13/2010 Recap: I’ll update this post with the link to the screenshot and the slide deck when Sergio posts it. Update: here they are. On a scale of 1 to 10, without thinking too much about it, I would give myself a 4 or a 5 on this one, and for a couple of (somewhat related) reasons: - a fundamental flaw of the presentation is that I was trying to give a high-level summary overview of the things that Udi and Greg and Mark are talking about, without having the benefit of the width and breadth...; posted @ Thursday, January 14, 2010 8:43 PM | Feedback (0)

There’s nothing wrong with ORM: Rob Conery, apparently bored again, decided to post a rant/whine/something about ORMs, apparently because of something Ayende posted. Apparently. It looks like this is a topic that he’s been thinking about for a while, so maybe Ayende’s semi-flamebait post was just the trigger. I don’t know. Anyway, Rob posted an initial commentary, and then, because he’s a wuss sensitive soul, he deleted it, and posted an edited commentary. I have the initial commentary since my RSS reader grabbed it, and I’m not sure exactly why he deleted it, as opposed to just posting a follow up. I didn’t think it...; posted @ Tuesday, December 29, 2009 7:20 PM | Feedback (8)

Those Wacky Software Craftsmen: Minor update: Scott addressed the attribution thing in this post, so retracting those comments. Recently, Scott C Reynolds has been writing a couple of posts about….well, it’s hard to tell exactly what they are really about, but at least in his mind they are apparently about quality and professionalism and maintainability and the usual laundry list of things that ‘software craftsmen’ like to pontificate about. As is often the case, there’s a nice mixture of well thought out insight, good advice, misguided idealism, hilariously misplaced snideness, and outright ignorance. But it makes for some fun reads. Don’t put...; posted @ Saturday, October 03, 2009 8:38 PM | Feedback (1)

Adding Tests to a Legacy System through New Requirements: I’m going to try to describe the way that I would approach adding tests to a system that doesn’t have them, and wasn’t built to support them. It will be a simple example, and isn’t intended to be anything other than a way in which I might approach this situation. When I say that it wasn’t meant to support them, I mean it has certain characteristics: Uber methods that access the file system, do some processing, make a call to a web service, send a new file through FTP, etc. No...; posted @ Sunday, September 27, 2009 10:54 PM | Feedback (0)

Some things I think I like about ‘Specification-style’ development: I specifically say ‘Specification-style’ to make it clear that I don’t pretend to be doing “full-blown” Context/Specification BDD as described by Scott Bellware here, or even that I can use MSpec as developed by Aaron Jensen (typical ‘non-approved software’ issue…whatever). Instead, what I am doing is taking what I take to be an important aspect of it and running with it. Of course, just because I take it to be an important aspect doesn’t mean it actually is, blah blah blah. I’m working on a system that does stuff in a very ‘legacy’ way. Keeping in mind that ‘legacy’...; posted @ Wednesday, September 09, 2009 8:21 PM | Feedback (0)

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