Achieving Test Driven Nirvana

Posted on April 7, 2010 by Martin Harris

Cuban Car: Martin Harris

Well perhaps not Nirvana then, but at least having a suitable level of test coverage.

I wanted to write an article around the uptake of test driven development. Scrum and agile are hard to do well. If you break these down, you often find that the components are pretty challenging too. TDD is difficult but it has gained widespread recognition at the intellectual level. On the ground though the practice can be patchy. Why?

Before writing this article I had a look around to see what else had been written. This article on Geiger’s Counterpoint sums up my thoughts exactly. Its such a good article that I hardly have anything left to say. In fact neatly I can just provide some bullet points!

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Leveraging Eclipse for TDD

Posted on February 1, 2010 by Martin Harris

I have found that quite a few programmers struggle to work in a completely test driven fashion. I myself whilst writing tests for many years, took a long time to move over to writing the test first. I think one of my problems was that I always wanted to do my thinking in the implementation class. Recently I have found a great way to leverage the Eclipse IDE’s code complete functions so that its more natural to work from the test class.

The idea is to save effort and time by getting Eclipse to create the implementation side. I have long been used to changing the code, and then using code complete to refactor. For instance you can change a class name or package name, and use CTRL-1 to get a list of options on the code that will not compile. Then use an option to move or rename the class performing the re-factor.

This turns out to be a very powerful technique for driving development from the test.

Try out this simple example I think it makes it more natural to TDD, but I would be interested in your comments.
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Untangling a Gigaspace Pojo

Posted on December 21, 2009 by Martin Harris

I am going to build myself another example application. I find these very handy for exploring ideas. If you already have a project with hibernate, spring, gigaspaces and such setup, your much more likely to try a few ideas out, and then blog them. So for a while this blog might be more quiet than usual. I think I may use Roo to do it. Roo looks like a great platform for quickly building something up for an experiment. i.e You can throw together a new set of entities, and then build an example on top of them. Before I begin, one last thing from my current experiments.

Sometimes JPA entity classes get hijacked.

Say for instance you have a need to pass entity classes to another system, via JAXB. Its possible to use DTO objects for the transfer or you could just annotate the the entity classes. In the example below, I wanted to fetch something from a database via JPA and write it into gigaspaces. It soon gets messy your Entity classes start to become a hub in the middle of your application with things dipping into some of the classes and annotating them and throwing them here and there.
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Test anti-patterns project, contributors wanted!

Posted on November 16, 2009 by Martin Harris

Take a look at the following test class. I deliberately wrote this poor quality test, so that I could show how easy it is to re-factor it to a better one. I was driven by having seen lots of such poor tests and to be honest I don’t want to see another of its ilk again. I might write a test like this myself, but I would never leave it like this. Its part finished. Its littered with cut and paste, poorly named methods and hard coded values. It’s a bit like a surgeon performing an operation and not sewing up the hole! I would go as far as to say that leaving tests in this state is unprofessional. There is no excuse as most of the lessons of good naming and code re-use have been written down a long time back. More lately in Clean Code by Robert C. Martin. I just don’t understand why people still write rubbish like this! Possibly because they are allowed to get away with it! Note that the test provides 100% coverage of the implementation class, but its not enough to stop there.

Have a read over the class, and then move on to read the steps to re-factor to better patterns. I have several designs here that focus on the setup stage of a test. As your tests get more complex you will find the patterns here support ever increasing complexity. In an Agile project you might move from one system to the next as the requirements ramp up. Then once you see where I am heading, I lay down a challenge.

Test anti-patterns project, contributors wanted!

If you have a Test Anti-Pattern that you would like to showcase. Check out my code from gitHub, add the new example and examples of how to re-factor the code. Blog it to your own blog with a reference to this page, or drop a comment. If we get enough I will setup a page with an index to all the blogs.

The code can be forked out with git from gitHub http://github.com/mhgit/TerribleJavaTestingMadeGood. It should be an easy start. Its a full maven project with a small dependency set and maven site reports already built in for test coverage. Its fully open source with the Apache 2.0 license. Once you have your new example, tell me about it by adding a comment to this page, and following the git forking instructions for making a git pull available.

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Transient Technology

Next time you look it might be gone

Tag Archives: re-factor

Achieving Test Driven Nirvana

Continue reading →

Leveraging Eclipse for TDD

Untangling a Gigaspace Pojo

Sometimes JPA entity classes get hijacked.

Test anti-patterns project, contributors wanted!

Test anti-patterns project, contributors wanted!