Steve Bryant - Testing

Which is Faster?

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 09:30:00-0500

In programming, discussions often come up about which approach to solving a problem is faster. Although I think these discussions often miss the point (as other decision factors often trump execution speed), they are still often informative.

I have had a few occassions recently where I wanted to answer these questions myself. It seemed tedious to continue to write code to test that out, so I decided to write a generic "Code Timer" to run code and test for execution times.

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Client Visible Unit Tests

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 09:00:00-0500

We recently started working on a project that, while relatively small now, has the stated potential to grow into a rather large and complex system in the near future. On a few big projects that I have now, I have regretted not having used TDD on them from the beginning (having learned TDD only well after those projects were already under way).

This seemed a perfect opportunity to do now what I wished I had done earlier on those projects.

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Preventing Errors

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:00:00-0500

Hopefully some dear readers can help me out with my current quandary.

I have several components that I use on nearly every site that I develop. By using them, I save untold hours of programming and therefore provide cheaper results for my clients. At the same time, I am using solutions that have been tried and proven rather than developing from scratch every time.

There is, of course, a catch to all of this.

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An Introduction to Writing Unit Tests (with CFUnit)

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:00:00-0500

In our last user's group meeting, we had a round table discussion about testing. I said that I would put together a simple example of a unit test. Since I have been using CFUnit so far (MXUnit looks attractive as well though), that is what I will use for my example. The principles should work the same for any common testing framework. [More]

My Weekend (Data Transformation,TDD,CFUnit)

Tue, 22 May 2007 14:48:00-0500

We have been working to enable access to our data via ODBC and/or MS Access - a project more complicated than expected. While we were working on this, I went to cf.Objective.

Among the very good presentations I attended was one called "Test Driven Development" by Paul Kenney. I had attended a few online presentations about TDD before and read a few articles as well. I always came away thinking that I should try that out "some day", but also feeling like I didn't quite grasp the concept fully (I did not grok TDD).

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