As the saying goes: do to others as you would have them do to you. When writing code, I would suggest a complimentary saying of “do to yourself as you would to do others”. Write your software as if it will be used by a very wide audience, even if you aren’t planning on being the … Read more
This article was originally published on mikesmithers.wordpress.com. “You can’t have your cake and eat it!” This seems to be a regular refrain from the EU in the ongoing Brexit negotiations. They also seem to be a bit intolerant of “cherry picking”. I’ve never really understood the saying, “You can’t have your cake and eat it” – … Read more
SQL Server replication works well on a low latency, high bandwidth network. When actual networks have high latency or limited bandwidth, problems may occur. Such conditions can be emulated with hardware or software tools. You can quickly set up a test environment to emulate high latency and limited bandwidth by using free, open source software. … Read more
In a development team, there are times when the relationships between developers and testers can become strained. How can you turn this potential conflict into something more positive? Is it part of the skill of team-working to find ways of avoiding friction, or should one blame a system that relies on good social skills to work well?… Read more
User Interface test automation is a tricky practice, and it's not always obvious what the benefits are. UI tests are an essential part of protecting your application's critical paths, and it's easy to start building them in the wrong way. Jim Holmes urges us to ask some pointed questions before we get started, and get start testing our UI the right way, for the right reasons.… Read more
Unit Testing has come to dominate the many types of test that are used in developing applications. This has inevitably been at the expense of other types, such as integration test. Does a successful unit test regime ensure quality, or should we see unit testing as just one of a range of tests that can together give us confidence in an application?… Read more
Alex's team of developers are geared to doing rapid development of database applications in a busy corporate setting, yet take considerable time over meticulous database design, extensive constraints, automated tests, error logs, and defensive coding. Why? Because it cuts down on the subsequent need for maintenanc… Read more
Is it realistic to keep to principles of 'Test-First' and 100% coverage for unit tests when in the heat of developing commercial C# applications? Does rigorous unit-testing lead naturally to good design by enforcing testability, low coupling and high cohesion? Patrick Smacchia gives his opinion based on hard-won experience. … Read more
The neat separation between processing and rendering in ASP.NET MVC guarantees you an application design that is inherently teastable. It doesn't guarantee that your application will be well-designed and quick to test. For that, attention to use-cases and the structure of your code is essential.… Read more
With database applications, the process of test and integration can be frustratingly slow because so much of it is based on manual processes. Everyone seems to agree that automation of the process provides the answer to accomodating shorter development cycles, but how, exactly? Dave Green describes a successful process that integrates third-party tools.… Read more
One of the more popular counters used by DBAs to monitor the performance, the Buffer Cache Hit Ratio, is useless as a predictor of imminent performance problems. Worse, it can be misleading. Jonathan Kehayias demonstrates this convincingly with some simple tests. … Read more
A Backup system is merely part of a recovery system. If your backups can't be used to recover the database, then they're useless. Do you regularly make sure that you can restore a database from your backups? … Read more
When faced with two viable solutions to a badly compromised database design, one using clustered indexes and the other compound primary keys, Grant Fritchey took the only sensible route: he gathered hard performance data...… Read more
This article aims to give an introduction to the challenges in testing web services, for those who do not have detailed technical knowledge about web services.… Read more
