Yesterday I was wrong » crazy talk

Crazy Talk – Holistic Web Testing – Some forces…

dan — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 07:36:30 +0000

So given the above, the forces I am trying to balance are

Make it easy for people to do the right thing, hard to do the wrong thing.
Make it valuable (Finds more bugs than false alarms)
Make it resilient (Allows me to refactor like the true crazy person I am)
Make it fast (Magnify it’s value rather deminishing it)
Make it good enough (Give me enough confidence to do more crazy stuff but don’t become dogmatic)
Allow people to do what they are good at

Next I’ll talk about how the default setup I use to do, in-memory, out of container testing.

Crazy Talk – Holistic Web Testing – Some values…

dan — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 19:20:59 +0000

(Previously on TWSDEV)

As the “crazy” guy behind the in-memory / out-of-container acceptance testing on a number of java/.net projects, I think it’s important I explain to people the “Why” and the forces / constraints I am trying to balance. But first I want to quickly lay down my beliefs and values:

I believe in testing as much as possible (UI included)
I believe tests must add more value than they cost (Measure it!)
I value tests that are fast and are resilient to change more than tests that take a long time to run and are brittle.
When refactoring a feature I value acceptances tests and integration test over unit tests.
When designing/exploring a new interface / object interaction I value unit tests over acceptance tests to help guide me.
I believe that QA’s are so much better at finding bugs than DEVs but worse at writing code / abstractions

The Crazy Talk Series – An introduction to an alternative web architecture and construction method

dan — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 16:22:19 +0000

If you have met me or worked with me in the last 15 years or so, you will know that I am pretty mad about the web as a platform, HTTP as a protocol and HTML as a state engine. Add to this the last 6 years or so practising agile techniques while building highly scalable websites and you tend to find that I have fairly unusual views in the field about how to build and architect web applications.

A lot of people say to me, Dan, you must write about X as the industry seems to be doing Y and while I find it very easy to talk in a face-to-face conversation or even a mailing list, writing an article or post has always been a challenge due to the one way nature of the conversation. Anyway after some gentle nudging by Sarah Taraporewalla, Christian Blunden and Martin Fowler I have decided to jump in head first and try and create a series of articles that will hopefully open a few peoples eye’s to some alternatives.

So enough with the why and onto the what I’m planning to cover in the series:

Caching on the wire not in the app
Addressable components
Personalisation, cachability and composition
Moving state off the web server
Web server decoupling, in-memory testing and lightning fast builds
Some alternative libraries
Common HTTP patterns