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 [...]
Five quick points about unit tests that will reduce your defect rates. Always stop to add that simple unit test. You will be amazed how often this discovers a bug or unexplored corner case. Never develop from a main method, find a way to turn it into a test. Main driven development is horrible, they [...]
Google have a nice equals method to make boiler plate equals easier to read. Particularly good if you have many attributes in the method. http://publicobject.com/2007/09/coding-in-small-with-google-collections_8175.html Be careful to check that your objects are consistent with equals though. I have mentioned this before.
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 [...]
In a previous post I looked at Unitils. This is a quick update: Yes its great but the product could do with some polish, better documentation, bug fixing and some api revision. Despite that its still the best system I have looked at to test a DAO. Also the project is alive and kicking, it looks like there is more to come in future revisions. See the full post for more detail.