Encouraging Collaboration via Review Branches and Pull Requests

I have always advocated the use of a small well balanced team for projects rather than many less experienced ones. However this is not always possible. Some time projects require a very fast ramp up with a much larger set of teams where achieving a...


Test-driving Builders with Mockito and Hamcrest

A lot of people asked me in the past if I test getters and setters (properties, attributes, etc). They also asked me if I test my builders. The answer, in my case is it depends. When working with legacy code, I wouldn’t bother to test...


Testing multiple properties with single assertion

Every time I was trying to test an object's properties I was neither satisfied writing very verbose tests nor in using some of the out of the box hamcrest matchers. Although using the matchers was a big help, I never managed to make them read...


Extract, Inject, Kill: Breaking hierarchies (part 3)

In part one I explain the main idea behind this approach and in part two I start this example. Please read parts one and two before reading this post Although the main ideas of Extract, Inject, Kill is already expressed, it's good to finish the...


Extract, Inject, Kill: Breaking hierarchies (part 2)

In part 1 of this post I explain the problems of using the template method in deep class hierarchies and how I went to solve it. Please read it before reading this post. Here is a more concrete example in how to break deep hierarchies...


Extract, Inject, Kill: Breaking hierarchies (part 1)

Years ago, before I caught the TDD bug, I used to love the template method pattern. I really thought that it was a great way to have an algorithm with polymorphic parts. The use of inheritance was something that I had no issues with. But...


Code coverage is a side effect and not an end goal time

In my previous life as a consultant, one of our clients hired us to "increase the code coverage" of their code base. We would not develop any new features or make any changes. They just wanted us to write tests. Basically they wanted us to...


Musings on Zero Downtime Deployment

I've been thinking about Zero Downtime Deployment for the past few weeks. I even raised it as a discussion topic in our LSCC Roundtable. Here are the key points discussed. Obviously the feasibility/suitability completely depends on the application and platform architecture. Also this is not...


Saxon XQuery With Multiple Documents

Saxon is a wonderful API for XML processing. It provides complete support for XPath, XQuery and XSLT. Although I'm always baffled with it's lack of adoption compared to Xalan and Xerces. Having said that the online documentation can definitely do with some improvement.  The following...


Mentorship in Software Craftsmanship - part 3

In previous posts I covered: Part 1: Mentor and mentee roles, gains and sacrifices, mutual respect Part 2: How to choose mentors and mentees and mentorship misconceptions Walking the long road together (or at least part of it) Once the relationship between mentor and mentee...


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