Panasonic Youth rob sanheim writes about software, business, ruby, music, stuff and things

Searching for the perfect in memory database

I’ve been using HSQLDB for my in memory database testing, but I think its time to find something else. Things have been getting pretty painful lately and I’m wondering what kind of experience others have with the alternatives. My criteria are:

fast
easy to embed in a Java test suite - so basically just drop [...]

Naming test objects - mock, stub, fake?

consistent names for “test doubles”

Buncha links for Friday - techie and otherwise

Nerdy

Ruby on Rails cheatsheet, done very nicely as always from ILoveJackDaniels
An idea on test invariants in TDD - basically a way to enforce design by contract using typical TDD + java/C# only - from Martin Fowler.
How Ajax reduced load on MacRumors.com during Jobs presentation on Ajaxian.
Bambi Meets Godzilla - anti-anti-hype and Ruby vs Python

Not nerdy

Hindsights [...]

Refactoring and abstractions

“you couldn’t refactor your way out of paper bag…”

Microsoft’s horrible TDD guidelines

So-called “guidelines” for TDD from Microsoft using Visual Studio 2005

Presenting “Better Software Through Refactoring” at Wisconsin JUGs

I’ll be doing a new presentation titled “Better Software Through Refactoring” at the upcoming Wisconsin and Madison Java Users Groups. Here’s the abstract from my NFJS page:
Refactoring is the process of improving the design of code without changing the behavior. The practice of refactoring is increasingly becoming a required skill for any professional developer, [...]

xUnit frameworks - they aren’t just for unit testing

I’ve had a discussion at my current client a few times where someone looks at a Junit test and says “this isn’t a unit test, whats the deal”. The answer usually is “yea, its a functional/integration/etc test - Junit is not just for unit testing”. Completely isolated, theoretically pure unit tests are great [...]

Using ajax for user monitoring, testing, and usability

I’m liking Eric’s idea on using Ajax for monitoring user actions for automatic error logging/capturing. Basically he is turning the tables on the common misconception that ajax can be used for evil “user spying” by instead using ajax to log all the users actions throughout the page for testing. He’ll be able to [...]

Book Review: Working Effectively With Legacy Code by Michael Feathers

a review of Michael Feathers book on getting code under test

TDD and accounting - keeping it in balance

Bob Martin has a very good post about how the tests in TDD are analagous to debits and credits in accounting. I really like the analogy of double bookkeeping to tests, and though I’ve read it before Martin’s post really hits home at the “sensitivity” of software and accounting and why we need the [...]