Software Reality

'Design Driven Testing' now available as an alpha book

"Design Driven Testing", which I'm co-authoring with Doug Rosenberg, is due for release by Apress later this year.

It's a little unsettling to see chapters available so soon after writing them. But definitely a good thing.

Three chapters are available in Apress' Alpha Books programme so far... we've just submitted another two chapters for technical review, so these should land on the Alpha Book page pretty soon.

We've changed the chapters around a bit in the last few weeks. Here's the current line-up:

Part I - DDT vs TDD

1. Somebody Has it Backwards
2. Hello World Using TDD (implementing a "Login" story with TDD)
3. Hello World Using DDT (implement a "Login" story/use case with DDT)

Part II - A Walk Backwards Through the Mapplet 2.0 Project

(In this part of the book, we walk backwards through a real-life DDT project being run at ESRI Professional Services in Redlands, California. Our story begins with the completed product - code, tests, UI - and ends at the beginning, with the initial set of requirements. We demonstrate how tests were used to provide feedback at each stage of the project. The project's actually going on right now, and we're documenting its progress - meaning we're effectively writing this set of chapters backwards...)

4. Code and Finished Product
5. Detailed Design and Unit Testing
6. Preliminary Design and Behavioural Testing
7. Use Cases and Acceptance Testing
8. Test Cases and Requirements

Part III - Advanced DDT

9. Unit Testing Don'ts (Testing antipatterns)
10. Unit Testing Design "TODOs" (how to write "test-conscious" code)
11. How to write Enterprise Architect Test Case transform templates
12. When Designing for Testability is Taken Too Far

The book's also now visible on Amazon - which makes me think that I should probably get on and finish it now...

Oracle should cannibalize JavaFX Frankenstein

My latest article at The Register:

The biggest coup for JavaFX three years after its unveiling at JavaOne is its integration into Vancouver2010.com, in a spinning-wheel app that shows countries' medal counts dating back to 1924. It's a nice use of data visualisation, a cross between tag clouds and a time-traveling version of Risk. But oh my word, the jaggedness of the text. Don't these people know that Java can do antialiasing very nicely? Even the "Powered by JavaFX" logo has embarrassing color bleed.

The Winter Olympics app is a rare moment of fame for JavaFX, in an otherwise bleak and underperforming history. The brazenness of JavaFX.com suggests otherwise. It's all flashing lights and bold headlines, as if the marketing team are standing around Frankenstein's [monster's] corpse sending shockwaves of electricity into it and insisting: "Look! Look! It lives! No, really, it does!"

Read more...

Enterprise Architect 8.0 beta is out there

Many readers will already be familiar with Enterprise Architect (EA), which I've previously described as the best OOAD modeling tool this side of the Pleiades Cluster. But the new version, now in beta, promises to be something special.

There's a bundle of improvements listed on the beta page, but the "biggie" for me is the new Structured Scenario editor. Anyone who's written use cases and then wanted to derive unit tests (or acceptance tests) from them will appreciate the added precision that this editor provides. If you look carefully at the screenshot (click to zoom in), you'll see that the use case is divided into user actions and system responses. The simple act of separating these out opens up all kinds of possibilities - writing behavioural tests that cover each system response, for example; or turning the "user action" half of the use case into a Behavior Driven Development (BDD) scenario.

The structured scenario editor is also featured in the new Design Driven Testing book, where we're showing how to create test cases for the new structured scenarios, and then generate JUnit/NUnit/FlexUnit tests straight from the test cases; and how to tie it all into BDD (using JBehave and NBehave), for good measure.