Shahid’s Perspectives

A couple of months ago I was introduced to Joe Ponczak, CEO of Codign Software, by my friend Andrew Glover. We had a great meeting where we discussed the current state of software quality management, test driven development, how hard it is to really test software well, and JUnit.

We all came to the conclusion that it would be great to have very high code coverage but that it’s a manual process fraught with difficulty and hassles as we go from 0% to even 50% or 60% test autmation and code coverage.

Then, Joe showed us CoView, his company’s new test automation tool. Andy and I were impressed. Really impressed. CoView is an Eclipse plug-in that automatically creates JUnit tests. These JUnit tests focus on executing code logic, “what-if” scenarios, and exception paths.

After going through the plug-in we could see that on average, it took a Java developer approximately 20 minutes to create a JUnit test case without knowing the level of coverage. It took CoView about 1.5 minutes to create a JUnit test case. Not only did the CoView-generated test cases execute as many “what if” scenarios as desired by the developer, they also resulted in 100% branch and basis path coverage. Very nice.

If you’re already doing JUnit testing, you owe it to yourself to check out CoView. If you’re not doing any test automation CoView could be your ticket into the test driven world without requiring hours and hours of manual test creation.

While I highly recommend it, the only drawbacks of CoView right now are:

• It’s an Eclipse plug-in. IntelliJ and other IDE users like me have to use Eclipse for the generator but once the test cases are generated they can be used in any IDE.
• Test frameworks other than JUnit are not yet supported. Perhaps Joe can comment and let us know what their plans are for some of the newer frameworks like TestNG.
• The generated test cases do have instrumentation code injected to track coverage and statistics. Joe and I talked about an option to generate code without instrumentation and he said they’re considering it but it will be difficult.

Head over to Codign and check out their free trial version.

Lee Gomes, of the Wall Stree Journal, recently wrote The Men Who Came To Dinner, and What They Said About Email. It’s an interesting discussion with the heads of the GYM (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) email groups about how each one approaches email, why they got into the space, and how users benefit from their respective email systems. I would have liked to have been invited to that dinner!

Here’s an interesting article reporting the results of testing SQL Server Express, MySQL, DB2 Express, and ORACLE 10g Standard Edition. MySQL generally comes out on top but the report is worth reading for what else it says.

Read it at Road test: Four databases tested.

Keep in mind that they were testing the “lite/express” versions of the commercial vendors but the “regular” version of MySQL so don’t read too much into the results. While enterprise databases are not in much danger, if you use an embedded database engine in your product it’s worth rethinking in favor of open source engines. One major drawback of the article was that it didn’t test PostgreSQL.

There’s a lot of talk these days about video podcasts taking off in 2006. And, I certainly agree that hobbyists will take to it like they have with audio blogging/podcasting. Jakob Nielsen recently discussed how video podcasting may be worse than TV from a usability perspective in his Talking-Head Video Is Boring Online article.

Of course, even if video podcasts won’t suck and their usability will not be challenging there’s still the slight problem of business model: will there be enough advertisers interested in small-market (long tail) video blogs? Will a subscription model work? It’ll be fascinating to watch everyone try and make money on it!

With CSS finally being available in all modern browsers most of us should already be using it on our sites. In case you need some help with navigation (using tabs), take a look at the More Free CSS Navigation Menu Designs.

famfamfam.com offers some great, free, icons in friendly web image formats. Great Christmas present for yoursefl if you’re a developer.

The year-end 2005 Google Zeitgeist is now live. It’s pretty interesting:

It turns out that looking at the aggregation of billions of search queries people type into Google reveals something about our curiosity, our thirst for news, and perhaps even our desires. Considering all that has occurred in 2005, we thought it would be interesting to study just a few of the significant events, and names that make this a memorable year. (We’ll leave it to the historians to determine which ones are lasting and which ephemeral.) We hope you enjoy this selective view of our collective year.

Weiqi Gao’s observation is Java People, Stop Worrying and Start Coding!.

Enough said.

Bruce Eckel, author and Java pundit, writes about the departure of the hyper-enthusiasts. He says, “the Java hyper-enthusiasts have left the building, leaving a significant contingent of Java programmers behind, blinking in the bright lights without the constant drumbeat of boosterism.” He goes on to write:

Where did the hyper-enthusiasts go? To Ruby, apparently. This is chronicled in Bruce Tate’s book “Beyond Java,” which should probably be titled “Why Ruby is Better than Java.” The book is roughly edited; you’ll find yourself thinking “haven’t I read this paragraph before?” in any number of places, but that’s a disappointing experience I’ve had with several O’Reilly books of late.

In many places he plays fast and loose, and almost at the end of the book he declares that he doesn’t have time to learn these other languages in any depth — although he has no trouble condemning the same languages in his rush to Ruby. Such a statement should be in the first paragraph of the book: “I’ve decided that I love Ruby, so I will condemn other languages without fully understanding them” (in one sentence repeated in a number of places in the book, for example, he declares that C# is no more than a clone of Java).

I’ve been on the rollercoaster of language-love myself in the past and have made similar mistakes; one error in particular was dismissing Python’s scoping-by-indentation when I first saw it (months later realizing that we always indicate scoping by indentation anyway, even when we have curly braces available). Now I try to investigate and support my ideas about these things more thoroughly. It takes a lot more time and effort to do so, but it also leaves a more lasting impression.

Well worth reading.

The recent purchase of Bowstreet, who tried to ride the wave of web services and later service oriented architecture, demonstrates how hard it really is to succeed in enterprise software in general but especially in software development tools. They raised $140 million in venture capital, had some of the best minds working there, good leadership and decent strategy, and they end up having about $10 million in sales per year to show for it.

Given the state of open source development tools, it’s hard to see how anyone but the big players can stay in business in that sector.