Should it be assertEquals(expected, actual) or assertEquals(actual, expected)?
This discussion came about because at the Chicago Code Camp, Jim Suchy from 8th light was demonstrating TDD in JavaScript by building a simple unit testing library. One of the methods he created was the typical assertEquals. In the code on github he had a signature of assertEquals(expected, actual) while during the demo he swapped the order, and I pointed out that the original was what I would have anticipated. He commented that there was an interesting discussion about it at his office a few days before. I’m interested to hear more about it, and I tweeted that I was inclined to get a debate going about it just to see what the different rationales were. This post is a collation of thoughts and opinions to date.
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Today’s blog is sponsored by the word “awesome”.
I’ve just come back from a trip to the awesome QCon London 2009 and the (thankfully) awesome speakerconf 09 (more of both in blogs soon, promise!)
Coming at the beginning of May, though, is the most awesome JAOO Australia 2009 in both Sydney and Brisbane. Last year’s inaugural event was awesome and this year’s looks to be its match.
The awesome Dave Thomas asked me to speak there on “something Enterprisey”, so I’m putting together notes and experiences on applying Agile practices to enterprise architectures. It’s easy to see that current economic drivers make it imperative for a firm’s technology leaders to do more to embrace rapid business change within IT. The talk will draw on ThoughtWorks projects across the globe, including those I participated in both in the US and Australia. It’s Neo Architectural. It’s for Modern Architects.
Also, my very talented and awesome wife, Amanda Laucher, will be presenting on DSLs and language-oriented programming, providing some insight on when to make one and some samples in C#, F# and MGrammar. Don’t worry if you only know Java or Ruby, you’ll get plenty out of the talk if you want to learn more about DSLs.
Amanda will also be teaming up with Joel Pobar to provide an Introduction to Functional Programming tutorial, with a focus on the awesome F# language. If you want to know about partial applications, dynamic pattern matching, idiomatic units of measure, and asynchronous workflows on top of the usual functional programming concepts, then this talk is for you. If someone at work is saying “we need to exploit concurrency” then this talk is for you. Again, if you’re coming from Java land that’s fine, there’s enough to get you looking at Scala or the awesome Clojure languages too.
I’ve been given the privilege of speaking at CodeMash 2009 in Sandusky, Ohio this coming January.
The presentation and discussion will cover the learning from implementations of Guerilla SOA and will include code and demonstration based on the WCF. It may change some minds about the default approach to the WCF programming model and open some eyes on how to build a truly message-oriented service oriented ecosystem.
Looking forward to a conference that comes highly recommended.
The submitted abstract
Title: Guerilla SOA for WCF
Track: Arch & Design
Level: Intermediate
Description:
This talk goes over the fundamentals of Guerilla SOA (a concept conceived in ThoughtWorks and championed by Dr Jim Webber) and how they are applied to WCF in both a SOAP and REST context.
Using principles from agile software development into an emergent architecture, particularly for services, the talk looks at an alternative approach to the usual usage of the WCF programming model which provides a true message-oriented approach (rather than the RPC hole almost every WS-* stack drives us into).
Drawing on real large-scale projects, we’ll touch on consumer-driven contracts, sensible XSD, alternate validation techniques, LINQ to XML, XPath, and a convention-based and MVC approach to web service implementation.
If you want to develop Ruby applications that use the services in the Microsoft® .NET Services cloud, then this SDK is for you:
http://www.dotnetservicesruby.com/
OK so I’ve been moving from Sydney to Chicago with lots of time at a client in Calgary. No posts, but some coming.
In the meantime, based on a note from my colleague Ian Cartwright on an article about Microsoft embracing AMQP, I wrote a little poem, for I am in a very poetic mood at present. I’ll tell you why next week!
There is a message queue open standard /
almost all implementations are free /
it’s the killer app of the internet /
and what’s its name? Lo! It’s SMTP!
Lots of technology blogs piled up, but first thing’s first.
Last week I was in Chicago for some meetings at the ThoughtWorks head office. On the Monday night one of my colleagues hosted a charity fund raising dinner which included some magnificent Ethiopian food (and beer).
During a presentation, she told us personal anecdotes about a trip to Africa and her visit to the AHOPE orphanage. We were told a number of stories of the adoption of kids into the few countries that allow foreign adoption of children with HIV and how now, with the anti-retroviral medicines becoming more readily available, those kids have more than just short-term palliative care in the orphanage, they have a chance at being raised in a healthy, comfortable (albeit Western) home and leading an independent adult life.
As they say on the site, ‘Are you looking for just the right gift that isn’t just “stuff” for a person who has everything and needs nothing, whose heart would be touched by reaching out to a child who has nothing and needs everything?’ Even if you’re not the next Brangelina, have a look at what you might want to donate to provide a lot of help for just a small amount.
This short video reminded me of being at my daughter’s pre-school - except of course these kids don’t have their parents picking them up after the songs are done.
My colleague Jay Fields recently blogged about the value of test names.
We had a little discussion about it yesterday on IM. Here’s a summary.
Josh Graham
I feel the test name is important for two reasons:
1) it is intentional programming - a neural pathway is established in your brain as you write the name of the test method so your mind tries to think about what the hell you are trying to achieve by doing all that typing
2) for those test consumers you speak of to get a sense of the behaviour of the system as specified by the stories and high level acceptance criteria
Jay Fields
2) [is] fair enough. Before introducing expectations on any client project I’ve brought it up as “what do you think about” and let the team decide. The last thing I want is an idea to be branded as bad because the wrong ppl used it
1) I think is based on the person. I always found it 10 times harder to write a sentence, I just want to get to the code but, I’m crazy for making the code intention revealing
Josh Graham
Picking a reasonable moniker for the test name is useful too, when something breaks (particularly if it occurs often)… “That #$%#$%! shouldRejectLostOrStolenCard test is failing again - must be the clearing house API has changed or they’ve crashed once more”.
Jay Fields
yeah, that’s an interesting point
wish you would have replied with that one, I’d have put it in my entry
We then talked about how to attach a moniker to the test on different languages - method names in Java being the easiest, while anonymous inner classes being a way to do so without having a moniker (other than perhaps a comment) at all.
I still contended that a method was a reasonable level of granularity to contain a test and use the method name as the moniker. A method (it’s declaration and its body) is location independent - it can be moved around in its module and you can still find it and its moniker appears in the abstract syntax tree so it’s very easy to find when using an editor that maintains an AST.
Jay’s responses to my scenarios in which this proves useful assume a short TDD cycle and also good developers.
So, while the test name may be superfluous in some cases, I don’t mind the extra mental effort of summarising the intent of the test into its name - and if that is overly difficult or not needed (both of which are plausible) then a banal label like enclosing the test in a method called “test1″ is a small price for me to package it up in a manageable, easy-to-find chunk.
YMMV.
I am in IT. I think it’s pretty easy to find that out about me. Nothing in my CV indicates the ability to fly aeroplanes or helicopters.
Either the pattern matching spamming software has gone wonky, or this dude has set a new low watermark…
(with apologies to the half dozen recruiters I have met that are anything but lame)
I have 1750 hours on Saab 340B and 340B Plus with American Eagle and
Pacific Coastal in the US and Canada respectively.
Is this a job for Rex?
> Hello Joshua
>
> Apologies if this has made it to you by mistake…..
>
> I am looking for EMB120 Pilots, Bell Helicopter pilots and Metroliner 23
> Pilots and SAAB 340 pilots for FO and captain roles.
>
> If you have 500+ hours on these types, please contact me as soon as you can.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Best Regards
>
> (name removed to protect the stupid)
> Recruitment Consultant
JoshG is a busy bee:
If you are a software technologist in Australia, I strongly encourage you to attend JAOO Australia as it is arguably the best technical conference in the world and it is certainly a boon to have it come to our neck of the woods. We are getting some superb international speakers that you’ll be able to interact with throughout the conference (they stay around at JAOO to learn too), and the more we support it, the more we’ll get next year.
Hot on the heals of the Mingle 2.0 announcement, ThoughtWorks Studios has released information on the next generation of the world’s most popular Continuous Integration engine, CruiseControl, called Cruise.
It is a ground-up rewrite accomplished in around 8 months with an emphasis on catering to enterprise software development teams and large-scale applications. It combines sequential build pipelines (for, say, progressively more complicated or longer-running tests) with concurrent build tasks using a grid of agents.
The Cruise server can dispatch work to agents on ye olde CruiseControl servers. Although the Cruise product is not Open Source Software, the licensing terms are generous and in line with Mingle. Pricing is yet to be released.
With the usability innovations of cc.rb and the great foundation laid by CruiseControl and CruiseControl.NET we’re excited at the prospect of using the newest and best Continuous Integration tool on the market, from the company who changed the way developers integrate their software changes and who wrote the book on build pipelines.
