http://www.lenholgate.com/ Len Holgate's thoughts on this and that... Mainly test driven software development in C++ on Windows platforms... - Refactoring en-us Len.Holgate@JetByte.com 2005-07-20T18:28:32+00:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000436.html Having got the CMessageProcessor under test in the last posting. I added a few easy tests for the object and then I came to another hard to add test. The reason that it was hard to add was that the... Posted by Len at 06:28 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Refactoring , Socket Servers ]]> 436@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Refactoring 2005-07-20T18:28:32+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000386.html I'm currently working on a simple auction server for a client. You can think of it as a specialised chat server, of sorts. One of the things it must do is broadcast messages from one user to a set of users. This is relatively easy to implement in a crude way in our socket server framework but it's not nice. Time to refactor towards niceness... Posted by Len at 11:10 PM | Comments (2) | Categories: Refactoring , Socket Servers ]]> 386@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Refactoring 2004-10-14T23:10:05+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000370.html I'm back with the guys on the refactoring project for a couple of days. I got to my desk, updated my CVS tree and started to check my email. The first mail was from the boss man of the team; "I fixed a bug in the FX code earlier in the week, we need to write a test for it so it doesn't happen again", followed by "by the way, this time all the tests still run, I checked them all myself on Monday". This is considerably better than last time I visited them. Posted by Len at 11:02 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Refactoring ]]> 370@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Refactoring 2004-09-09T23:02:16+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000349.html I've got one of those 'please dig us out of this hole before we ship on Friday' gigs this week. I'm back with the refactoring project for a few days and, well, when the cat's away... So, we're 80% done but none of it seems to work, no tests, and the design seems a tad overly complex and it just must go live by Friday... Our task is simple, just clean things up, make it work right and finish the other 80%. The code is the usual mess of highly coupled, overly complex, unrestricted, unplanned, half understood, thought droppings; at least there's no XML... Posted by Len at 07:26 AM | Comments (2) | Categories: Refactoring ]]> 349@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Refactoring 2004-08-03T07:26:38+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000314.html 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 is that the builds are still repeatable and most of the tests pass. The bad news is only most of the tests pass. Posted by Len at 01:41 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Refactoring ]]> 314@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Refactoring 2004-05-25T13:41:12+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000236.html I have a couple of days to myself. We've just shipped some code to a client a couple of days ahead of schedule and we're waiting to recieve a purchase order from another client so I find myself without any client work to do. I've decided to try and refactor the socket server code that we're using a lot right now. Whilst working on the code that we've just shipped I realised that the new code I was writing was much easier to test than the socket server library that formed a major part of the project, so now that I have some time I'm going to try and rectify that. The problem is, it means facing up to some unfortunate facts... Posted by Len at 11:12 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Refactoring , Socket Servers ]]> 236@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Refactoring 2004-01-27T11:12:54+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000220.html My time working on the refactoring project has come to an end; at least for a while. Here's a little look back over what we achieved. Posted by Len at 11:42 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Refactoring ]]> 220@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Refactoring 2003-12-20T11:42:14+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000214.html The refactoring project rolls on. Mostly it's been more of the same so I haven't bothered boring my reader with the details. This week we had an interesting bug to fix. The bug had appeared in a much earlier version, way back in July, but it had only been reported by one user and we could never duplicate the problem. This week we managed to duplicate it, and then we needed to work out what it was and when it was added to the source... Posted by Len at 08:21 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Refactoring ]]> 214@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Refactoring 2003-11-21T08:21:27+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000179.html I've spent the last couple of days back with The Refactoring Project. They've done well in my absence. They managed 3 releases; all correctly tagged and repeatable. They started some refactoring of their own and, at first glance, it looks like they've taken on board lots of the suggestions I've been making over the last months. They've fixed a couple of new bugs in the FX code and whilst doing so found that a) the bugs were easy to locate, b) they were easy to fix with very localised changes, and c) the new code was much easier to work with! They even ran the tests after making the changes! All in all quite a reassurring result. Now, of course, I have to move away from the relative safety of the newly refactored FX code (complete with tests) and back into the pile of code that has yet to be touched... Still, at least things are heading in the right direction. Posted by Len at 08:24 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Refactoring ]]> 179@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Refactoring 2003-10-01T20:24:25+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000147.html Today we wrote some complicated FX business logic tests. Things like making sure that the FX library can calculate a EURUSDCAD 1M rate - it can; or a USDCAD ON rate - it can't... Posted by Len at 06:43 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak , Refactoring , Testing ]]> 147@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2003-08-13T18:43:30+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000145.html On Friday we got to the point where the FX buiness logic code was suitably decoupled from the display logic that we could write our first test for the business logic. In the words of Homer Simpson, "Woo hoo!". Posted by Len at 07:28 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak , Refactoring , Testing ]]> 145@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2003-08-11T07:28:02+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000142.html Bleugh! You are lost in a maze of crapy code, all alike (and much of it copy and pasted!). The last few days have been deep in the heart of darkness. Gently teasing the business logic and the display logic of the FX code apart so that we might one day be able to write tests for the business logic. Posted by Len at 10:21 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak , Refactoring ]]> 142@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Refactoring 2003-08-07T22:21:04+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000105.html I'm a firm believer that software rots unless you're very careful; and like apples, once one piece starts to go bad the rest quickly follows. The Pragmatic Programmers talk about Software Entropy and The Broken Window Theory and, unfortunately, this week the refactoring project showed how true this is... Posted by Len at 07:29 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak , Refactoring ]]> 105@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2003-06-24T07:29:06+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000081.html The refactoring project rolls on and the code gets better. This week saw a marked change in attitute from some of the developers on the team...... Posted by Len at 12:11 PM | Comments (2) | Categories: Geek Speak , Refactoring ]]> 81@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2003-06-13T12:11:51+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000063.html Another week another release. Well, almost. The plan was to release today. The plan ignored the fact that most of the team are at a wedding this weekend and nobody was around today and nobody's around on Monday...... Posted by Len at 12:06 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak , Refactoring , Testing ]]> 63@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2003-05-31T00:06:09+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000061.html Now that the refactoring project has tests it's worth having a daily build so that it's easy to spot if someone checks something in that breaks a test.... Posted by Len at 11:23 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak , Refactoring ]]> 61@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2003-05-27T23:23:55+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000052.html Last week we were a 5.5, now we're an 8. Not bad progress, but there's still a long way to go until the project can get a 'SaneMark'... Posted by Len at 12:51 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak , Refactoring ]]> 52@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2003-05-18T00:51:30+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000048.html One of the problems with the code base that we're refactoring is that it's full of dead code. Throughout the system there were swathes of code that were commented out, there was very little in the way of explanation as to why the code was not currently required and when it might be required again. This week we dealt with it... Posted by Len at 09:16 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak , Refactoring ]]> 48@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2003-05-17T09:16:07+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000045.html Bob Cringely has been upsetting some programmers with his comments on refactoring. He seems to intentionally miss the point that not all code changing is refactoring: some of it is still just hacking. Refactoring is risk management. Posted by Len at 11:53 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak , Refactoring ]]> 45@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2003-05-11T11:53:07+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000041.html Joel Spolsky has a quick test to rate how good your software development process is. I thought it would be useful to see how the refactoring project scores.... Posted by Len at 07:17 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak , Refactoring ]]> 41@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2003-05-09T07:17:06+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000037.html I always used to think that there was probably a good reason behind things I didn't understand. Now I'm far quicker at deciding that the reason is that the person who created the thing I don't understand didn't understand either. Posted by Len at 08:22 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak , Refactoring ]]> 37@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2003-05-08T08:22:36+00:00