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Is Your Code SOLID: The Dependency Inversion Principle
The mother of all SOLID principles. Nail this one, and you’ll keep your codebase supple — ready for just about any change you throw at it. The Dependency Inversion Principle comes in two flavors: HIGH...
View ArticleWhy Unit Test?
Nobody changes until the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of change ~ Anonymous If the code I come across in my work is any example, most developers haven’t drank the Unit Testing...
View ArticleQualities of Good Unit Tests
So — you’ve been tasked with insuring your code has unit tests. What does that mean, really? According to Wikipedia, unit testing is a software design and development method where the programmer gains...
View ArticleEncapsulating Your Way To Better Unit Tests
I an earlier blog, I discussed the qualities of good unit tests. Primarily, good unit tests are fast, isolate the bugs, repeatable, self-validating and timely. At first blush, that seems easier said...
View ArticleExceptions are Easy. Except when they’re not.
Assuming all the code compiles correctly, is Foo.Load() exception safe? Is there anything I need to change in Load’s exception handler to insure an instance of Foo is always in a valid state?...
View ArticleExceptions are Easy. Except When They’re Not (Part 2)
Nothing is said which has not been said before. ~ Terence (195/185 BC-159 BC) Playwright of the Roman Republic In a previous post, I posed two questions to my readers (all √(-1) of them): whether a...
View ArticleThe Bottleneck
Nearly 70% of all software projects are considered unsuccessful. They are late, over budget and have fewer features than users wanted (and often ones they didn’t want – I’m looking at you, Clippy). I...
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Using Velocity Charts and Burn-Downs to Drive Development
Imagine you’re the driver in a car cruising along the Seven Miles Bridge in the Florida Keys. Sunny day. Clear. There are no other cars, and you’ve been given permission from the Florida Troopers to go...
View ArticleSoftware Craftsmen, Laws and Principles, Oh My
Many software developers have written about various Principles and Laws of software development. We talk about things like SOLID, OCP, SRP, LSP, DRY, LoD, and whether these things help or hinder. To...
View ArticlePromises, Promises
Promises are like babies: easy to make, hard to deliver. ~Anonymous Every .NET interface, every COM interface, and every API is a promise. A contract of sorts. We all know that — it’s the point of an...
View ArticleWhat Makes a Good Automated Test Suite
You’ve heard rumblings about a push for developers to add more automated testing to our code. That’s good. You also may have heard it phrased as “adding unit tests.” That’s bad. You see, it’s only part...
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