David Dossot

In a recent blog post titled "The Limitations of TDD", Jolt Awards colleague Andrew Binstock shared some reservations Cédric Beust has about TDD. When a person of extensive experience like Cédric speaks about testing, you pay attention. And I did. Among the very interesting quotes from Cédric that Andrew has reproduced, the following really struck me: Another important point is that unit tests are a convenience for *you*, the developer, while functional tests are important for your *users*. When I have limited time, I always give priority to writing functional tests. Your duty is to your users, not to your test coverage tools. You also bring up another interesting point: overtesting can lead to paralysis. I can imagine reaching a point where you don't want to modify your code because you will have too many tests to update (especially in dynamically typed languages, wh... (more)

Software Manifestos: A Matter Of Trust?

As software manifestos have started to proliferate these past months, I have started to wonder what could be the root cause for their creation. Why would thought leaders gather, assert a small set of values and shrink-wrap them as a manifesto, calling for others to sign it? My feeling is that these manifestos are the expression of a pushback on a particular aspect of software development that went insane. Here is a little game: match the manifestos with the software insanities they push back on: Big methodology and design up-front Software craftsmanship manifestoArmy of flying monk... (more)

ESB Testing Strategies with Mule

To be able to do anything useful, an ESB must be configured with all sorts of parameters, from endpoint connection URIs to message transformation scripts to content-based routing definitions. Moreover, ESBs like Mule can host custom components, which will process messages and perform user-specific actions on them. Deploying a new version of an ESB configuration raises the question of whether it will break anything. How can we build confidence that everything will be just fine? If unit testing did it for standard software development, what can it do in the realm of the ESB? Since... (more)

The Holy Grail of Persistence?

One of the very first CTO-grade decision I had to take in the making of Snoget was to pick what would become our main transactional persistence engine. Since we're using Erlang exclusively for our production servers, the solution seemed easy: use Mnesia. But I settled for PostgreSQL. At this point, anyone who's been dealing with O/R mapping (like Ted Neward who said: "Object/relational mapping is the Vietnam of Computer Science"), should cry fool: Mnesia would offer me persistence without any impedence mismatch with the application runtime environment and I preferred a SQL databa... (more)

Meeedia Playeeer

I've been caressing the idea to buy a Wi-Fi enabled media player in order to tap into the gigabytes of (legal) music that sits in my NAS. I've considered investing into a Logitech Squeezebox, or a similar product, but I wasn't sure such a device would be able to play directly from an NFS share, without any music server running somewhere. Just when I started to consider building a player out of a SheevaPlug, I remembered of the ultimate source of cheap hardware, ready to be repurposed: eBay. $125 and a few days later I had a like-new black Asus Eee PC 2G Surf waiting to be turned ... (more)