Andrew Powell

Into The Mind of A Solutions Architect

Andrew Powell

Entries Tagged as Test-Driven Development

My Bookshelf - See What I'm Reading

April 28, 2008 · No Comments

I get asked a lot:  "What is the best book for learning 'x'?".  Well, I decided that I would post my own bookshelf, a listing of all the books I personally own (tech related).  You can browse through the listing, and, if you like, purchase the book from Amazon.

My Bookshelf

→ No CommentsTags: Adobe · AIR · AJAX · ANT · Apache · ColdFusion · Flex · General · Hibernate · Java · Oracle · Spring · Test-Driven Development · XML

CFUnited 2007 - Integrating Spry & ColdFusion 8 - Assets Download

June 27, 2007 · No Comments

Thank you to everyone who came to my session today on using Spry & ColdFusion. I have been giving this presentation now since January and think I have it fairly well refined, but there is always room for improvement. I was made aware that my slides are not in the conference book, so I am including them in the zip file here. If you didn't make the presentation today, but would still like to learn more about Spry & ColdFusion, I am giving a repeat session on Saturday at 9:45AM. If you did see the presentation, and want to know more, please come by and see me at the Universal Mind booth in the exhibit hall. Number one on my schedule tomorrow is fellow UM consultant Thomas Burleson's talk on continuous testing. He has a nifty new tool he will be debuting that will help keep your test shells in sync with your code. Being a big fan of TDD, I will not want to miss this. One last note: Universal Mind has developed a curriculum for Spry training. If you are interested, please come see me at the Universal Mind booth and we will work on getting you locked in for a training session. BTW, big thanks to the ColdFusion team for helping me get one of my demos working!

→ No CommentsTags: Adobe · AJAX · ColdFusion · Conferences · General · Speaking · Spry · Test-Driven Development · Training

"But It Passed Unit Testing!"

May 09, 2007 · 1 Comment

I got bit by this one late yesterday. I was pounding my head against a wall about a problem I was having. A VO I was working with passed all it's unit tests. However there was combination of methods, when used, that were causing the VO to not function properly. The root cause was that the values of the VO were being saved in a cookie and the cookie was getting too big. Hence CF chokes on it and it the operation fails. (The data was being stored as XML. Changed it to JSON and we save tons of space, but that's another story.) The point, however, was this: Just because an element passes your unit tests does not assure you that it will pass integration testing. There are always variables outside of your unit tests that you cannot count on.

→ 1 CommentTags: ColdFusion · General · JSON · Test-Driven Development · XML

The Testing Timeline

April 23, 2007 · 1 Comment

  1. Unit Testing
  2. Integration Testing
  3. System Testing
Unit Testing - Testing individual units of source code Integration Testing - Testing groups of units as modules System Testing - Testing of all groups as an application as a whole entity These terms are not interchangeable. They are not synonyms. Each is its own step. Learn this and know this inside and out. It will make you a better developer, I promise.

→ 1 CommentTags: ColdFusion · Test-Driven Development

cfcUnit 1.2 ANT Task Buildfile Sample

April 18, 2007 · 1 Comment

I'll categorize this under the category "for my own reference" since I use this blog as a way to occasionally log tricks and techniques I'll need to use later. Here is a sample of an ANT buildfile for automating cfcUnit tests within Eclipse. <project default="All Tests" name="MyTest">

<property name="cfcUnitLib" value="c:\webroot\cfcunit\lib" />
<property name="hostname" value="dev.mydomain.com" />

   <taskdef resource="org/cfcunit/ant/antlib.xml">
    <classpath>
    <pathelement location="${cfcUnitLib}/ant-cfcunit.jar"/>
    </classpath>
   </taskdef>

<target name="All Tests">
    <cfcunit verbose="true" showstacktrace="true">
       <service hostname="${hostname}"/>
       <testclass name="net.infoacelerator.tests.allTests"/>
    </cfcunit>
</target>
   
</project>

→ 1 CommentTags: ColdFusion · Eclipse · General · Test-Driven Development

Test-Driven Development Demystified

March 13, 2007 · 9 Comments

Test-Driven Development (TDD). Most ColdFusion developers are either ignorant or afraid of the term. Slowly, but surely, though CF developers are coming around to wonders of TDD. TDD is not about testing your application, but building working code, faster. That being said, let's get into the process of TDD.

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→ 9 CommentsTags: ColdFusion · General · Test-Driven Development