Test driven design

I don’t know quite what it is, but something about test-driven development (TDD) appeals to me. Perhaps it strikes a chord with my fundamental belief that machines should do the work so that people have time to think. Or perhaps it’s because TDD appeals to my anal nature. Whatever the case is, I like any opportunity to automate things, and although I’ve never done any, TDD seems to an absolutely brilliant way to spend one’s days.

Only down side is – I’m on an integration project at the moment, and so the opportunity for TDD is limited, right? Well, it might be a wee bit harder, but we shouldn’t let that stand in the way. ThoughWorks have a whitepaper (written by Gregor Hohpe and Wendy Istvanick) that talks about their approach to TDD in enterprise integration projects.

It lays out really clearly all the component pieces needed to overcome the challenges in creating automated tests for enterprise integration solutions, and gives some pretty good advise on designing for testability – which is probably not on our radar at the moment.

Might just drop this on the test analysts desk come Monday.

A lot of spam

I’m currently getting a lot of spam, and the default WordPress configuration doesn’t do much about it. Thankfully, the Akismet plugin is available – it’s just not enabled by default. Now that I’ve enabled Akismet, the bots seem to have stopped attacking me – or perhaps I’ve inadvertantly broken the comment functionality. Time for some regression testing! I’ll be right back…

Regression testing complete! No, the fact that there have been no comments since enabling Akismet is yet another proof (if one were needed) that correlation does not imply causality.

However, once comments (legitimate and otherwise) start to trickle in once more, I’m not sure Akismet will have solved my problem or not. I’ve enabled spam filtering because I don’t want to have to do it myself. However, spam filtering is imperfect, and Akismet can’t guarantee that there won’t be false positives. To guard against this, one presumes that some sort of manual process is in order. Net gain: zero. Alternatively, I can embrace the risk that I may miss out on considered, thought-provoking feedback whose only fault is a higher-than-average use of trademarked names for erectile disfunction medicine.