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Software As If It Matters

David Dossot

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Top Stories by David Dossot

In a recent blog post titled "The Limitations of TDD", Jolt Awards colleague Andrew Binstock shared some reservations Cédric Beust has about TDD. When a person of extensive experience like Cédric speaks about testing, you pay attention. And I did. Among the very interesting quotes from Cédric that Andrew has reproduced, the following really struck me: Another important point is that unit tests are a convenience for *you*, the developer, while functional tests are important for your *users*. When I have limited time, I always give priority to writing functional tests. Your duty is to your users, not to your test coverage tools. You also bring up another interesting point: overtesting can lead to paralysis. I can imagine reaching a point where you don't want to modify your ... (more)

Legacy Code Sonar Signature

In "Working Effectively with Legacy Code", Michael Feathers gives this definition: To me, legacy code is simply code without tests.He also adds: I've gotten some grief for this definition.Indeed, defining legacy code is hard. After purging one of our project from code that we consider legacy (deprecated, EJB2...), we noticed this interesting trend in our Sonar dashboard: Notice how code co... (more)

ESB Testing Strategies with Mule

To be able to do anything useful, an ESB must be configured with all sorts of parameters, from endpoint connection URIs to message transformation scripts to content-based routing definitions. Moreover, ESBs like Mule can host custom components, which will process messages and perform user-specific actions on them. Deploying a new version of an ESB configuration raises the question of wh... (more)

Meeedia Playeeer

I've been caressing the idea to buy a Wi-Fi enabled media player in order to tap into the gigabytes of (legal) music that sits in my NAS. I've considered investing into a Logitech Squeezebox, or a similar product, but I wasn't sure such a device would be able to play directly from an NFS share, without any music server running somewhere. Just when I started to consider building a player ou... (more)

Software Manifestos: A Matter Of Trust?

As software manifestos have started to proliferate these past months, I have started to wonder what could be the root cause for their creation. Why would thought leaders gather, assert a small set of values and shrink-wrap them as a manifesto, calling for others to sign it? My feeling is that these manifestos are the expression of a pushback on a particular aspect of software development... (more)