Loving my new Magic Trackpad

Just received my Magic Trackpad from Apple today.  Very impressed after a bit of use with it.  Love all the different gestures that you can map to.  After using this, a mouse is going to seem awfully archaic.

Brief history of mock objects

A brief history of mock objects, a story told by Steve Freeman. Good read as to the "why" of mock objects and how Hamcrest, jMock, and others came about.

http://www.mockobjects.com/2009/09/brief-history-of-mock-objects.html

Steve Freeman on sustainable TDD

Excellent presentation by Steve Freeman on sustainable TDD.  Lots of great tips for making your unit tests easier to comprehend and maintain.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Sustainable-Test-Driven-Development

 

 

Practical styles of pair programming

Excellent blog on pair programming.

http://blog.xebia.com/2010/05/09/practical-styles-of-pair-programming/

A quote from the blog entry:

"No you're not faster on your own, you're just creating more crap for your colleagues to puzzle over and eventually delete. The code you write alone sucks. That guy that is getting on your nerves is trying to tell you (clumsily) that your code sucks, try to listen to him and you'll turn into a better programmer." 

Have you encountered one or more of these styles?  How many developers are pair programming these days?

 

Tool coming to Xcel Energy Center

Tool is coming to the Twin Cities this summer!

Tool concert on July 1, 2010

Tickets go on sale this Saturday.

Uninstalling Mac developer tools

If you ever need to uninstall the Mac OS X developer tools, you do it with one command:

sudo /Developer/Library/uninstall-devtools --mode=all

Found this advice here.

Mac OS X key bindings

I'm trying to make my Xcode environment a bit more friendly and thus I'm investigating key bindings. A good article that summarizes how to change key bindings system-wide.

http://www.erasetotheleft.com/post/mac-os-x-key-bindings/

Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work with Xcode. My original investigation started here.

Test-Driven in Groovy presentation in the bag

Joe Muraski and myself did a Test-Driven in Groovy workshop at GR8 in the US conference here in Bloomington, MN this past Friday. If you're interested in the materials (presentation, demo app), you can get it all right here. The demo consists of a Java web app with lots of opportunity for refactoring, Groovy unit tests, and Cucumber (via cuke4duke) acceptance tests.

iPhone presentation

What a great turn out for the iPhone presentation last night. Thanks to everyone that came out. I've updated the Google Groups page for the presentation with links to blogs and other interesting information pertaining to iPhone platform development.

http://groups.google.com/group/jamsessions/web/10-04-07-iphone-os-the-next-killer-platform

A huge thanks goes out to my co-presenter, Bob McCune. The SenateJam demo was a big hit.

Preparing for DevJam Jam Session iPhone presentation

I've been spending some time working on an iPhone development presentation that Bob McCune and I will co-present at DevJam's Jam Session this coming Wednesday. I was looking at job trends at indeed.com--iPhone is #3 on the list of top job trends. Here's the graph:

iPhone Job Trends

iPhone jobs

Wow! Talk about growth. Looking forward to the presentation.

First impressions of the new iPad

What a beautiful device! A little bit heavy to hold in one hand for an extended period of time. Smudges from finger taps and swipes are more noticeable on this device, especially when reading text. I'll have to investigate a protective film and see that makes any difference.

The processor in this device is very fast; the device is very snappy with animations, games, and video. I can see game makers really going after this thing. EA seems to have a couple of games out for the iPad (I tried Scrabble and Need for Speed). Game control was very good for Need for Speed.

Transferring .epub files to your iPad

Transferring .epub files purchased outside of iTunes seems to be very easy. Download the .epub file to your computer. Open up iTunes and select File -> Add to Library... menu item. From the file chooser, select the .epub file that you want to transfer to your iPad. Click Choose and the eBook file will be added to your Book Library in iTunes 9.1. Sync as usual and the book will show up in iBooks.

Nice Mercurial tutorial by Joel Spolsky

Joel Spolsky (of Joel on Software) wrote a very entertaining and thorough tutorial on Mercurial, a distributed version control system (DVCS). The tutorial has a Subversion re-education pre-tutorial for those of us with Subversion brain damage. Well worth a look. Sadly, Joel will no longer be blogging, citing the need to focus on his growing software company. His musings on software development will be missed.

Mockito's @InjectMocks annotation does reflection-based DI

I've been using @InjectMocks heavily lately since it came out in version 1.8.3 of mockito. The javadocs for this annotation state that it uses setter injection to inject its dependencies. Being a lazy developer, I was writing a unit test yesterday at work and forgot to write the setter methods for a couple of dependencies on the SUT that I was testing. Lo and behold, the test passed and all mock verifications were satisfied. Very confused, I went back to some other unit tests and their SUTs and removed the setter methods. In all of my cases, the tests continued to pass. A quick note to the mockito list confirms what I discovered--@InjectMocks actually is using a reflection-based DI scheme, not unlike what Spring does when you annotate collaborator fields in a Spring bean with @Autowired and @Resource. Very cool feature, as this further reduces code noise. Here is the discussion on Google Groups.

Cool features in Cucumber, part 1

My Cucumber adventure (via cuke4duke) continues. I have been busy writing features and building out step definitions in Groovy. Groovy absolutely rocks for this sort of thing. I'm doing some more elaborate Cucumber features (at least in my novice head) and came upon this blog posting. Very handy stuff. More related to the Ruby version of Cucumber, but most of the concepts transfer over to cuke4duke.

PeepCode screencast: Use the Cucumber

I've been interested in acceptance testing tools recently and Cucumber has been at the top of my list. PeepCode recently released a screencast on Cucumber. I've viewing it right now; the screencast is excellent and a nice introduction to Cucumber. I'm thinking of using it on a Grails web app. The screencast is based on a Rails 2 web application, which Cucumber seems to integration seamlessly with. Supposedly Cucumber is technology agnostic and works against any sort of web application.

CoverScout for retrieving iTunes album art

I recently purchased the MacHeist nanoBundle, a collection of Mac OS X applications and utilities. One of the utilities included in the bundle is CoverScout, a utility that will allow you to browse your iTunes library and retrieve hard to find album art. I have a fairly large collection of music and iTunes has been pretty average in its attempts to find album art. CoverScout will retrieve album art from many different sources and allow you to select which image to use. The images are also rated by quality. Very cool utility.

New annotations in mockito 1.8.3

Mockito 1.8.3 was recently released and I got a chance to use it today. There are a couple of new annotations available in this release: @Captor, @Spy, and @InjectMocks. I was able to use @Captor and @InjectMocks today. Even after just a few minutes with these two annotations, I'm sold. Very cool enhancement. I spent some quality time with EasyMock last week, and there's nothing easy with EasyMock. Ugh!! If you're hip to using mock objects in your Java unit testing efforts, you really should look at mockito these days. Details about @Captor and @InjectMocks follows.

@Captor

This annotation will automatically create typed argument captors (org.mockito.ArgumentCaptor<T>) in your unit tests. Argument captors are essential in verifying indirect outputs to your mocked collaborators.

public class Test{
    @Captor ArgumentCaptor<Foobar> foobarCaptor;

    @Before
    public void init(){
       MockitoAnnotations.init(this);
    }

    @Test 
    public void shouldDoSomethingUseful() {
       //...
       verify(mock.doStuff(foorbarCaptor.capture()));
       Foobar capturedFoobar = foobarCaptor.getValue();
       assertEquals("foobar", capturedFoobar.getName());
    }
 }

@InjectMocks

Automatically injects mocks by type using setter injection. Constructor injection is not currently available, but if you want to provide a patch, the mockito team will gladly consider your contribution. I'm actually more interested in reflection-based injection, similar to what Spring uses when annotating dependency fields using @Autowired. Having your unit tests inject dependencies via reflection would help me avoid the set* methods on the implementations. I may have to play with this a bit.

public class FooBarManagerTests  {

       @Mock private FooDependency mockFoo;
       @Mock private BarDependency mockBar;
       @InjectMocks private FooBarManager manager = new FooBarManagerImpl();

       @Before 
       public void initMocks() {
           // Initializes all mocks and then injects those mocks into the FooManager instance.
           MockitoAnnotations.initMocks(this);
       }

       @Test 
       public void shouldDoSomething() {
           manager.doSomething();
           verify(mockFoo).doSomethingToFoo(any(String.class));
           verify(mockBar).doSomethingToBar(any(Integer.class));
       }
   }

Gerard Meszaros "From Concept to Product Backlog" talk

I just finished up an InfoQ presentation by Gerard Meszaros discussing how to go from the conceptualization of a project to the manifestation of a product backlog. I really enjoyed the presentation and it hits on some gray areas of current agile implementations that I have worked on. Highly recommended.

Adopting Agility with XP, Scrum and Lean Thinking - Powered by RegOnline

David Hussman is leading an agile course next week. Still room for participants to register.


Adopting Agility with XP, Scrum and Lean Thinking