http://www.lenholgate.com/ Len Holgate's thoughts on this and that... Mainly test driven software development in C++ on Windows platforms... - Testing en-us Len.Holgate@JetByte.com 2008-06-03T13:11:37+00:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000783.html It has been a busy couple of weeks for me. I've been working on an ISO 8583 based transaction server for a client and I set myself some fairly tight deadlines. I actually developed the first version of the server... Posted by Len at 01:11 PM | Comments (2) | Categories: Socket Servers , Testing ]]> 783@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2008-06-03T13:11:37+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000782.html Last week I mentioned that some of my tests for my Win32 Debug API class had suddenly started failing. It seems that I was right and the changes are due to some .Net fixes that have been rolled out recently.... Posted by Len at 03:37 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Testing ]]> 782@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Debugging Tools 2008-05-06T15:37:00+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000780.html Back in October 2007 I sumarised my findings from getting my Win32 DebugAPI based debug engine working on x64. One of the strange things that I found at the time was this: When running a CLR app under the Win32... Posted by Len at 04:43 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Geek Speak , Testing ]]> 780@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-05-01T16:43:42+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000775.html There's an entry over on the Dr. Dobbs blog about testing and how you make sure that your tests are testing the right thing; effectively, who tests the test. There's a question at the end "What do you do?" and... Posted by Len at 10:24 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak , Testing ]]> 775@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2008-04-15T22:24:52+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000773.html The comments to my last practical testing entry got me thinking. The commenter who had located the bug in part 15, which was fixed in part 16, suggested a new approach to the problem and I've been investigating it. The... Posted by Len at 06:54 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Source Code , Testing ]]> 773@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2008-04-09T18:54:51+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000771.html Back in 2004, I wrote a series of articles called "Practical Testing" where I took a piece of complicated multi-threaded code and wrote tests for it. I then rebuild the code from scratch in a test driven development style to... Posted by Len at 10:28 AM | Comments (5) | Categories: Source Code , Testing ]]> 771@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Source Code 2008-04-04T10:28:39+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000680.html Back in April 2006 I posted a copy of TickShifter, see here for details. It seems that there was a bug in my Win32 debugger code on which TickShifter is built. The bug was that we failed to "forget about"... Posted by Len at 05:52 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Testing ]]> 680@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2007-03-05T05:52:34+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000655.html It's funny how potential product ideas beget other potential product ideas and the thing that you eventually end up with as a product for sale is often far from the original product idea and the code that you started to... Posted by Len at 07:07 AM | Comments (7) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Debugging Tools , Testing ]]> 655@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Debugging Tools 2006-05-12T07:07:26+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000649.html One of the first things that I tried to do with the latest release of my TickShifter tool was to run it on itself. Of course, that didn't work. There are several reasons why the tool might have had problems... Posted by Len at 08:31 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Testing ]]> 649@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2006-04-12T08:31:47+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000648.html As I mentioned a while back, I've been working on adding rudimentary GUIs to my debugging and testing tools. In fact, both the deadlock detection tool and the time shifting tool are both functional enough for real world use but... Posted by Len at 09:49 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Testing ]]> 648@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2006-04-09T21:49:28+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000647.html Well, I figure that I've written about these debug tools that I've been working on for long enough. The time has come to make one available for other people to use and abuse. Given that I hope to sell some... Posted by Len at 04:47 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Testing ]]> 647@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2006-04-04T16:47:24+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000628.html I'm currently investigating a memory leak in a complicated piece of multi-threaded code. Unfortunately the code doesn't have any unit tests and the leak only shows up reliably in the release build. Worse, I wrote the code and nobody has... Posted by Len at 07:29 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Testing ]]> 628@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2006-01-20T19:29:19+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000624.html The size of the "units" that I test with my unit tests varies quite considerably. Usually I tend to work at the single class level; the test will provide mocks for the services that the class requires and the tests... Posted by Len at 01:12 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Testing ]]> 624@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2006-01-16T13:12:47+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000610.html ImplicitInterfaceImplementation - from Martin Fowler is an interesting piece where Martin suggests that it would be useful to be able to provide alternative implementations of a class's implicit interface. That is, given a class that does not inherit from an... Posted by Len at 09:57 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Dumbing down is dumb , Testing ]]> 610@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2006-01-07T09:57:58+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000593.html In case you missed it the first time around... We're doing the old "assert is evil"/"Oh no it isn't" thing over at Ned Batchelder's place.... Posted by Len at 09:42 PM | Comments (2) | Categories: Testing ]]> 593@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2005-12-21T21:42:31+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000591.html A couple of days ago I mentioned that I was having some problems with loading symbols for a common controls dll. I'm now pretty sure that it was my problem, as usual, rather than someone elses. I've reworked my process... Posted by Len at 10:51 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Testing ]]> 591@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2005-12-17T10:51:23+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000590.html I was using one of my home made debugging tools recently and it kept crashing :( I assumed it was something I was doing but I've eventually tracked it down to where I load the symbols for the loaded modules... Posted by Len at 09:17 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Testing ]]> 590@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2005-12-14T21:17:28+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000587.html As I mentioned last week, I'm currently doing some Java work with an investment banking client. This week I added JMock to their toolset. JMock is a dynamic mock object generation tool that works with JUnit to allow you to... Posted by Len at 11:32 AM | Comments (2) | Categories: Testing ]]> 587@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2005-12-09T11:32:16+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000584.html Mark Pearce writes about Debugging a .Net Windows Service from within the IDE. We do something similar with our C++ Windows services but, as you've probably come to expect from me, it's slightly more complicated than Mark's approach.... Posted by Len at 10:38 AM | Comments (6) | Categories: Testing ]]> 584@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2005-11-30T10:38:19+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000581.html Kevin Barnes over at Code Craft has just written an interesting piece on TDD. In it he claims that "Excessive unit testing infrastructure hampers your practical ability to refactor things efficiently. People scream at me when I say this. Unit... Posted by Len at 03:10 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Testing ]]> 581@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2005-11-19T15:10:34+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000576.html Recently I finished developing a high performance ISO-8583 financial transaction authorisation server for a client and whilst I was running the final black-box tests against the server I realised that these particular tests were dependant on the system date of... Posted by Len at 10:20 AM | Comments (4) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Testing ]]> 576@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2005-11-11T10:20:48+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000575.html Ian Griffiths has just written a nice piece on profiling .Net code and why the obvious things that people do are often very wrong: "Unfortunately, lots of developers just love to go off on micro-benchmarking exercises, where they write about... Posted by Len at 11:32 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Testing ]]> 575@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2005-11-09T11:32:54+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000573.html "Because of a subtle bug called a "race condition," a quick-fingered typist could accidentally configure the Therac-25 so the electron beam would fire in high-power mode but with the metal X-ray target out of position. At least five patients die;... Posted by Len at 01:30 PM | Comments (4) | Categories: Testing ]]> 573@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2005-11-08T13:30:23+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000568.html For the last week or so I've been working on measuring and improving the performance of our socket server framework. A long time ago I posted a version of this framework on CodeProject, I then updated it here and here... Posted by Len at 12:18 PM | Comments (15) | Categories: Socket Servers , Testing ]]> 568@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2005-11-03T12:18:20+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000566.html Last year I wrote a series of articles called "Practical Testing" where I took a piece of complicated multi-threaded code and wrote tests for it. I then rebuild the code from scratch in a test driven development style to show... Posted by Len at 12:50 PM | Comments (2) | Categories: Source Code , Testing ]]> 566@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2005-11-01T12:50:10+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000549.html There's a lot of talk about how unit tests shouldn't touch the network or the file system or databases whilst they're running. Michael Feathers even has a set of unit test "rules" (A Set of Unit Testing Rules) which go... Posted by Len at 02:42 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Testing ]]> 549@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2005-10-22T14:42:15+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000539.html There's a nice story over on "Bug Babble" about debugging a problem with a robot by using various sounds coming out of a speaker to determine where in the code the problem occurred: "Now the robot sounded like a modem... Posted by Len at 09:18 AM | Comments (8) | Categories: Testing ]]> 539@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2005-10-11T09:18:15+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000537.html Jeremy D. Miller writes about The Dependency Injection Pattern; or what I've tended to call "Parameterise from above". He covers the various ways you can inject a dependency into a class rather than having the knowledge of the dependency hard... Posted by Len at 11:07 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Testing ]]> 537@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2005-10-09T23:07:13+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000505.html Ben over at Code Circle is thinking about unit testing COM objects. I did quite a lot of this back in 2000 when I was working with an investment bank. The first thing you need to realise is that COM... Posted by Len at 07:12 PM | Comments (5) | Categories: Testing ]]> 505@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2005-09-16T19:12:10+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000488.html One of the things that I've always been a bit unsure of is the claim by dynamic languages crowd that static typing buys us nothing as the unit tests solve the same problem. It's a nice idea but I'm a... Posted by Len at 05:30 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Testing ]]> 488@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2005-09-01T17:30:03+00:00