Test Harnesses are counter productive...

How often do you hear:

'Why do I need to write tests when I've got a perfectly good test harness?'

Now I hear this often and I'm not surprised anymore when I hear it, it's a sign of a dis-functional team where team members don't value the team they only value their output.

I've highlighted the words that give it away:

'Why do I need to write tests when I've got a perfectly good test harness...'

There is no 'I' in 'TEAM'!

Anyone who insists test harnesses are just as good as automated tests is plain wrong.

They're selfish developers who only care about the code they've written - and probably don't get involved with the team. The reason it's selfish is because they might well be able to test all edge cases with their test harness but how is anyone else meant to know how to achieve this. They can't unless they understand exactly how the test harness is constructed and to be used. It's more productive from a team point of view for everyone to write automated tests that are run automatically on checkin & build.

Now more than likely the people who refuse the accept TDD methods are either 'duct tapers' or 'old timers' who in general are past their sell by date anyway - if you can't accept knew ideas then you are definitely in the wrong industry.

At all the 'old timers' - do doctors still regularly recommend leaches?

Awkward Coder

Comments

Integrating jasmine into Visual Studio 2010/2011 beta

Following on from my previous post about testing javascript with jasmine. I was interested to explore integration into visual studio 2010 so I could run them along side test written in another language like C#. I found the VS 2010 extension Chutpah (pronounced 'hutz-pah'). This got me up and running with the ability to run test manually and to my surprised it worked by only have the SpecRunner.html file open. I didn't a csproj or sln file containing the javascript, it's clever enough to resolve all dependencies: Test results are render in the output window of VS 2010: This is good and I appreciate the work someone has done to get this far but I want more... I want integration into Resharper... A quick squizz on the inter'webs and I end posting a request on jetBrains forum , it looks like support is coming in R# 7. Then I thought lets check out the current beta and see, so off I go and boot Win8 and install R#7 beta and see if it's there yet... ...

Showing a message box from a ViewModel in MVVM

I was doing a code review with a client last week for a WPF app using MVVM and they asked ' How can I show a message from the ViewModel? '. What follows is how I would (and have) solved the problem in the past. When I hear the words ' show a message... ' I instantly think you mean show a transient modal message box that requires the user input before continuing ' with something else ' - once the user has interacted with the message box it will disappear. The following solution only applies to this scenario. The first solution is the easiest but is very wrong from a separation perspective. It violates the ideas behind the Model-View-Controller pattern because it places View concerns inside the ViewModel - the ViewModel now knows about the type of the View and specifically it knows how to show a message box window: The second approach addresses this concern by introducing the idea of messaging\events between the ViewModel and the View. In the example ...

WPF tips & tricks: Dispatcher thread performance

Not blogged for an age, and I received an email last week which provoked me back to life. It was a job spec for a WPF contract where they want help sorting out the performance of their app especially around grids and tabular data. I thought I'd shared some tips & tricks I've picked up along the way, these aren't probably going to solve any issues you might be having directly, but they might point you in the right direction when trying to find and resolve performance issues with a WPF app. First off, performance is something you shouldn't try and improve without evidence, and this means having evidence proving you've improved the performance - before & after metrics for example. Without this you're basically pissing into the wind, which can be fun from a developer point of view but bad for a project :) So, what do I mean by ' Dispatcher thread performance '? The 'dispatcher thread' or the 'UI thread' is probably the most ...

Awkward Coder

Search This Blog