Walking up a sand dune

[lokheed]

When I finished work yesterday I had ten remaining open bugs for the current release.  When I started work this morning that had grown to 18, and more came in during the course of the day.  I just now wrapped up work, leaving a list of eight open bugs for this release.  That means I worked my tail off today for a net gain of two bugs.  Somehow that just doesn't seem right...

In other semi-work related news, I have been reading an absolutely amazing book the past few days - Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler.  This book has opened my eyes to some amazing techniques for improving my code, very straightforward steps to improve the structure of the code without effecting the end result.  Refactoring is basically a way to battle the forces of entropy that creep into a large code base, and even better it allows me to safely go back and change some of my poor coding decisions of the past.  Through a combination of small steps combined with automated unit testing, I can make changes and know right away whether those changes broke anything.  I am also discovering how much of a time saver it is to actually write automated unit tests before I start writing code.  It seems counter-intuitive, but it really works.  So I am kind of geeking out over refactoring right now.  Don't mind me.

On the non-work front, Ben started back at school this week.  He was *so* happy to be going back, he really misses it.  All last week he kept saying, "The bus is here!  Very soon!  School!"  I really like his new bus driver and monitor, and his new teacher seems very nice as well.  I think it's going to be a very good school year.

Kris seems to be settling in nicely.  Now that she has her car, she is out exploring the area and getting to know her way around.  She is also an excellent cook.  I feel like a complete goober when I make some simple thing for dinner, and then the next night she knocks out some elaborate meal.  Even her simple meals just seem so much better than mine.  I gotta start practicing more...

Comments

[wingedelf.livejournal.com]

If you're writing automation pre-coding, will you share those scripts with QA? So much of our automation is lacking- either it just walks pages and doesn't really verify anything, or we've been busy with enough other stuff that it hasn't gotten updated since pre-4.0- and doesn't work.

I'd like to actually have the time to work on a harness that uses the IE object model so that we can get dynamic testing written that's not quite as involved as getting LoadRunner (which, BTW, i'm convinced is the wrong tool for what we need to do with it) to actively test. Now, if we were in a position where we wanted to actually load test, and needed to simulate 10K users crawling the site at a time, that'd be a different situation...

[lokheed.livejournal.com]

Absolutely, my intention is to add an nUnit project to StarTeam that will contain the test classes. I am holding off pushing this until after we split up Uber, because it will become much easer once all of the libraries are sent off to their own project.

I am also playing with nUnitASP, which lets you do automated scripted testing against the web pages. I have tested as far as the login page, and what I intend to do is write a sequence of methods so that you could then chain them together in tests. I would have a TestUser class with username and password properties, and then we could create a bank of static test users like StaffAdminUser or AU_AgentOwnerUser. Then you could build up test scripts as easily as something like:

DoLogin(StaffAdminUser);
ClickTopLevelNav("Marketing");
ClickSecondLevelNav("How To");

etc.

I am also working on templates to make it easier to create the test classes, so other developers can just open up the appropriate nUnit test project and in the IDE just hit New -> nUnitTestClass and they'll get a .cs file already pre-formatted with the class declaration and a sample test. It's all pretty slick.

Once it's all up and going, QA would have full access to the unit tests and could run a full automated regression test of all existing unit tests by just clicking "go" in the nUnit GUI. Way cool stuff.