May 2004
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Blog's a year old
Been a busy week, I meant to post this on The Day. I’ve been writing this stuff for just over a year now. I didn’t really know what to expect when I started, I just wanted a place to ramble on about this and that. During the … -
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More than 20 years on and still as much to say
I’m currently re-reading The Mythical Man Month 20th Aniversay Edition and I’ve just finished watching Apocolypse Now Redux. Both seem to have as much to say now about their respective subjects as they did in the day. … -
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The perils of premature 're-use'
Back in January I was writing a TCP/IP server for a client that acted as a connection gateway. Just as this project was coming to an end we started on another project which, at first, seemed quite similar; it was a TCP/IP server that … -
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Skate weekend
We managed to get in two skate sessions this weekend, which was nice. The weather was lovely and on Saturday we spent some time at Kensington Gardens. This was our third skate this year and we finally started to feel we’d got our legs … -
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Easy performance improvement for the socket server code
I was discussing the performance of The Server Framework with someone the other day and realised that there was a reasonably easy way to speed up some types of servers. I coded a first cut of the solution last night and, so far, it shows a … -
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Practical Testing
One of the common complaints about TDD and unit testing that I see is that the examples used aren’t real. People often say that the examples used are toys and that writing such tests adds little or no value. To be honest, I often find … -
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Practical Testing: 1 - Introduction
I’m writing some blog entries that show how to write tests for non trivial pieces of code. This is part 1. The code that we’re going to test is CCallbackTimer. This is a class that lives in our Win32Tools library. It’s … -
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Practical Testing: 2 - The first test
I’m writing some blog entries that show how to write tests for non trivial pieces of code. This is part 2. In part 1 I introduced the code that we’re going to write a test for. Now we’ll move towards the all important … -
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Monday Mornings
Tell me about it. This morning I was shaving and thinking how I was actually early enough to be able to walk to Bank Tube station rather than jumping on the tube at Old Street. It looked like a nice morning and I had lots of plans for the … -
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Practical Testing: 3 - Test 2, Enter The Mocks
I’m writing some blog entries that show how to write tests for non trivial pieces of code. This is part 3. Last time we wrote the first test. It doesn’t test much, but it proves we can test. Now we’ll write a real test for … -
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Practical Testing: 4 - Taking control of time
I’m writing some blog entries that show how to write tests for non trivial pieces of code. This is part 4. We have a test for SetTimer() but it’s not as robust as we’d like. The problem is that the class under test is runs … -
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Mythical Man Month
I finished re-reading the Mythical Man Month today. It was a good read, and, just as when I read it just after the 20th anniversary edition came out, still very relevant to software development today. I found Brooks’ enthusiasm and … -
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Practical Testing: 5 - Testing shouldn't be this hard
I’m writing some blog entries that show how to write tests for non trivial pieces of code. This is part 5; the one where we find a bug we weren’t expecting… [Update: Welcome to anyone who’s coming here from the link … -
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Back with the refactoring project
I spent a little time with the guys on the refactoring project last week. Of course, as is the way, pressure from the business for more functionality has reduced the amount of clean up work that they’ve been able to do. The good news … -
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Practical Testing: 6 - Tests refactored
Previously on Practical Testing: The last entry ended with us having two tests, both of which were in need to a good refactoring. The second test had uncovered an unexpected bug… This time around we’ll refactor the tests, fix … -
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Testing shouldn't be that hard
Yesterday’s Practical Testing post was a bit of a mammoth testing exercise. The threaded nature of the component under test makes testing it harder than you’d think; and this is just a single worker thread that we have to worry … -
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Gripe of the day; explorer's desire to scan entire folder trees
OK, so who was the bright spark that decided that when I click on a folder at the root level of a drive Explorer goes off and scans the entire folder tree from that point down before expanding the one folder I’m interested in? More …
