Does white space matter? You bet it does. Is it easy to define the rules for something as simple as when you should and should not insert a blank line? No. I’ve never written or read a concise and unambiguous…
Blog Archives
TDD is dead?
Ah, the good old “Is TDD dead?” debate. Such fun. I was listening to the same old arguments going round in circles, and I’ve heard them so often I was able to sit back and ponder, and had a couple…
Posted in Uncategorized
Unit Testing Freemarker Templates
I encountered a defect arising from a Freemarker template, fixed it, and then wanted a better way of testing it than firing up the app and checking the effects visually in a browser. Ignoring for a minute whether or not…
Hamcrest JSON Matchers
I couldn’t find a Hamcrest matcher for JSON that worked how I wanted, so I adapted the JsonAssert library. This allows you to use dot notation to specify the path to a node in a json string, and use any…
Posted in Clean Test Code, Hamcrest
Why Clean Code Matters
An old favourite: For three days and nights the Java master did not emerge from his cubicle. On the fourth day the monks of the temple sent a novice to inquire after him. The novice found the master at his…
Posted in Uncategorized
Dangerous Words
A department trialing the use of agile in a predominantly waterfall organisation sent a status update to the traditionalists in program management. It contained the phrase “backlog of technical debt”. To us in the Scrum world, that means one thing,…
Posted in Uncategorized
Scrum Task Board Tips
Call it your story wall, call it your agile board, call it your scrum wall, call it what you like. I call it a task board, and I like to keep it simple. If you’re in a situation where you…
Posted in Agile
Bean Mapping With ModelMapper
I’ve never found a satisfactory method for mapping bean properties. They always add too much ugly set-up code, especially for conditional mapping or type conversions. Perhaps ModelMapper is the best so far. Let’s say you have a source bean with a…
Posted in Java
Loading Resources In Tests
Some level of tests, let’s call it integration testing because it’s not technically unit testing, often need to load resources like XML samples from the file system. A talented developer I worked with recently, came up with this nice use…
Names Should Be Expressive When Writing Tests
It is still surprisingly common to see test methods named “test” followed by the name of a some method that’s going to be called. Sometimes you get a few words mentioning some other internal detail, like This sucks. I’m amazed…
Posted in Clean Test Code, JUnit
