Archive for May, 2008

Testing.com URLs no longer work

I’ve sold testing.com, partly because I got offered enough money, partly because exampler.com really reflects better what I do today, and partly because I like to force myself not to cling to the past. If marick@testing.com is in your address book, please change it to marick@exampler.com.

All the content for testing.com has been transferred here. There are two simple rules to convert from old to new URLs:

To those of you who will dutifully change links: I thank you, I appreciate it, and I regret the inconvenience. Next time I see you, I’ll buy you a drink or trinket of your choice.

I was hoping the buyer would leave the non-root pages redirecting to the current pages for a time, but as of today they’re not.

FlexMock and RubyCocoa

I struggled using mocks in RubyCocoa. Here’s what I learned, using FlexMock.

I’m writing some tests to understand and explain the RubyCocoa interface to key-value observing. Key-value observing is yet another way for one object to observe another. (I’ll call these two objects the @watcher and the @observed.)

If I were describing a key-value observing test over the phone, I’d describe it as having four steps:

  1. Set up the relationship between the two objects.

  2. Change an attribute of @observed.

  3. During that change, expect some @watcher method to be called. One of the arguments will be an NSDictionary that contains the values before and after the change.

  4. Also expect that the value really truly has been changed.

Here’s how I’d describe it in code:

  def test_setting_in_ruby_style
    newval = 5
    during {
      @observed.value = newval
    }.behold! {
      this_change(:old => @observed.value, :new => newval)
    }
    assert_equal(newval, @observed.value)
  end

I have an idiosyncratic way of using mocks in Ruby. Notice the order in my English description above. I say what the test is doing before I say what happens during and after that action. But mock expectations have to be set up before the action. In Java (etc.) that requires steps 2 and 3 to be reversed. In Ruby, I can use blocks to put the steps in the more normal order. (You can see the definitions of during and behold! in the complete code.)

Since each of the tests sets up almost the same expectations, I hived that work off into this_change:

  def this_change(expected)
    @watcher.should_receive(:observeValueForKeyPath_ofObject_change_context).
             once.
             with(’value‘,
                  @observed,
                  on { | actuals |
                       actuals[:old] == expected[:old] &&
                       actuals[:new] == expected[:new]
                  },
                  nil)
  end

That’s a fairly typical use of FlexMock. I specify three arguments exactly, and I use code to check the remaining one. (There are components in the actuals NSDictionary that I don’t care about.)

Now I have to start to do something special. Here’s setup:

  def setup
    super
    @observed = Observed.alloc.init
    @watcher = flexmock(Watcher.alloc.init)
    @observed.addObserver_forKeyPath_options_context(
                @watcher, value‘,
                OSX::NSKeyValueObservingOptionNew | OSX::NSKeyValueObservingOptionOld,
                nil)
  end

Normally, an argument to flexmock just provides a name for the mock, useful in debugging. However, key-value observing only works when the @watcher object inherits from NSObject. So I pass in an already-initialized object for FlexMock to “edit” and add mockish behavior to. It’s of class Watcher, which inherits from NSObject. But why not just use an NSObject?

I could, except for a helpful feature of key-value observing. Before each call into the @watcher, key-value observing checks if it responds to the method observeValueForKeyPath_ofObject_change_context. If not, it raises an exception.

If I just passed in an NSObject and gave FlexMock an expectation that it should_receive an observeValueForKeyPath_ofObject_change_context message, FlexMock would just attach that expectation to a list of expectations. It would not create any method of that name; rather, method_missing traps such calls to the method and then checks off the appropriate expectation.

Therefore, I have to create a Watcher class for no reason other than to contain the method:

class Watcher <  OSX::NSObject
  def observeValueForKeyPath_ofObject_change_context(
             keyPath, object, change, context)
  end
end

The method doesn’t have to actually do anything; it’s never called. Instead, FlexMock redefines it to trampoline a call to it over to message_missing.

You can find the rest of the code here: mock-example.rb.

Hope this helps.

Everyone needs a cryptic slogan

I’ve been talking to Jason and Jonathan, the post-Agile guys, about post-Agile. I don’t get it, but that’s OK. What it made me realize is that a properly obscure name for the kind of software development I want to do is…

Retro-Futurist
Micro-Scale
Anarcho-Syndicalism

It is supposed to connote:

  • Back to giddy optimism!

  • Technology! Shiny!

  • Don’t fret about “Them”

  • Goals and preferences over rules

  • We’re all in this together

Perhaps there will be t-shirts and posters by Agile2008.

P.S. I use the term “anarcho-syndicalism” pretty loosely. Don’t forget the two lines of qualifiers.

Conference of the Association of Software Testing 2008

The third annual Conference of the Association of Software Testing (CAST) 2008 in Toronto, July 14-16. Early bird registration ends May 30. Here’s what Michael Bolton has written about it:

A colleague recently pointed out that an important mission of our community is to remind people–and ourselves–that testing doesn’t have to suck.

Well, neither do testing conferences. CAST 2008 is the kind of conference that I’ve always wanted to attend. The theme is “Beyond the Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Software Testing”, and the program is incredibly eclectic and diverse. Start with the keynotes: Jerry Weinberg on Lessons from the Past to Carry into the Future; Cem Kaner on The Value of Checklists and the Danger of Scripts: What Legal Training Suggests for Testers; Robert Sabourin (with Anne Sabourin) on Applied Testing Lessons from Delivery Room Labor Triage (there’s a related article in this month’s Better Software magazine); and Brian Fisher on The New Science of Visual Analytics. Track sessions include talks relating testing to improv theatre (Adam White), to music (yours truly and Jonathan Kohl), to finance and accounting (Doug Hoffman), to wargaming and Darwinian evolution (Bart Brokeman, author of /Testing Embedded Software/ and one of the co-authors of the /TMap Next/ book); to civil engineering (Scott Barber), to scientific software (Diane Kelly and Rebecca Sanders), to magic (Jeremy Kominar), to file systems (Morven Gentleman), and to data warehousing (Steve Richardson and Adam Geras), and to data visualization (Martin Taylor)… to four-year-olds playing lacrosse (Adam Goucher). There will be lightning talks and a tester competition. Jerry Weinberg will be doing a one-day tutorial workshop, as will Hung Nguyen, Scott Barber, and Julian Harty.

Yet another feature of the conference is that Jerry is launching his book on testing, /Perfect Software and Other Testing Myths/. I read an early version of it, and I’m waiting for it with bated breath. It’s a book that we’ll all want to read, and after we’re done, we’ll want to hand to people who are customers of testing. For some, we’ll want to tie them to a chair and /read it to them/.

The conference hotel is inexpensive, the food in Toronto is great, the nightlife is wonderful, the music is excellent…

More Information
================
You can find details on the program at http://www.cast2008.org/Program.

You can find information on the venue and logistics at http://www.cast2008.org/Venue.

Those from outside Canada should look at http://www.associationforsoftwaretesting.org/drupal/CAST2008/Venue#customs.

You can get registration information at http://www.cast2008.org/Registration.

Paying the Way
==============

If you need help persuading your company to send you to the conference, check out this: http://www.ayeconference.com/Articles/Mycompanywontpay.html.

And if all that fails, you can likely write off the cost of the conference against your taxes, even if you’re an employee. (I am not a tax professional, but INC magazine reports that you can write off expenses to “maintain or improve skills required in your present employment”. Americans should see IRS Publication 970 (http://www.irs.gov/publications/p970/ch12.html), Section 12, and ask your accountant!)

Come Along and Spread The Word!

===============================

So (if necessary) get your passports in order, take advantage of early bird registration (if you register in the next two weeks), and come join us. In addition (and I’m asking a favour here), please please /please/ tell your colleagues, both in your company and outside, about CAST. We want to share some great ideas on testing and other disciplines, and we want to make this the best CAST ever. And the event will only be improved by your presence.

So again, please spread the word, and come if you can.

First review draft of RubyCocoa book

I’m ready for people to review the first draft of my RubyCocoa book. Here’s the goal of the book:

With any complex framework, there’s a moment when you realize you finally have a feel for it—when faced with a new problem, you’re able to guess whether the framework addresses it, roughly how it will address it, and where to look to find the details. The aim of this book is to give you that feel for Cocoa and RubyCocoa. […]

You can fetch the most recent draft from http://www.exampler.com/tmp/drafts/current.dmg. It’s 80-some pages and contains the first six chapters:

  • Introduction

  • How Do We Get This Thing Started?: A fast introduction to RubyCocoa.

  • Part 1: Building a Useful App

    • Working with Interface Builder and XCode: Drawing a user interface, putting code behind it, and debugging that code. Text fields and text views.

    • One Good App Observes Another: Extending the app to use interprocess communication to listen to another app. The Cocoa Notification system. Reopening Objective-C classes.

    • A Better User Interface: Buttons (and the default button), combo boxes (and first responders), and a highly decoupled app architecture.

    • Taking Advantage of Ruby: A DSL to make it easier to define actions, delegates, and methods that post or receive notifications.

Here’s what I’d like to hear about:

  • Any parts you have to struggle to understand.

  • Parts that move too slowly or too quickly.

  • Whether the book is taking the right approach, or started with the right approach and has veered off track.

  • Problems with the code samples. Don’t struggle to fix them—let me know and let me fix them.

  • Whether you’d buy the book if the rest is like what you see.

Don’t bother with typos, grammatical errors, or layout problems (like highlighted words that run together or long identifiers that stick past the margins - those will get fixed in due time).

You can send comments to me directly or via the book’s mailing list.

Thank you.