Third party product testing

Seems like it wasn't just a bad brainwave I had when I posted about testing 3rd party libraries. James Greening did a post on this as well. Saves me the trouble of elaborating. ;-)

Exam. Done!

So it is finally over. I had my exam yesterday morning. It went well. My grade was 10 (on a special danish scale to 13). And I am satisfied with that. Now I can practice relaxing. Some.

I am picking up my laptop that has been broken since monday. I had actually managed to break the motherboard (and the screen), how I did that I dont know. But they replaced both. Price: 3900 kr. Ouch. I could buy a new desktop for that money. Happily I aint paying. But I know now to be very careful. It is the first time in my 5 years of using a laptop only that I have broken one down. It is usually "only" the harddisk that breaks down. Which is actually worse!

This weekend we are going to our house in the country. I will be coding on a job that is up for first test monday, and Kat will be watching the royal baptism. All by the roaring fireplace. Can't get much better than that I assure you. It has been snowing heavily in denmark during the week, so it will be fantastic up there. Watch out for pics next week.

The joys of studying

I am currently studying for dear life for my Advanced OO Programming exam in two days. I had forgotten how much energy it takes learning concentrated, especially when you have to learn stuff that you are not going to use much after the exam. Admitted, there are great stuff in there like Design Patterns, Refactoring and so on that I will use, but also other things that are not pressing in my current line of work.

I just want to get it over with now. I feel ready enough. So bring it on.

Yesterday my laptop broke down. Really. I think it is related to the power supply, cause the thing is positively dead. Hopefully I will get it back by friday. Fortunately the hard drive was intact. That was my first concern. So I have my data. Especially my notes for the exam! But I feel so naked without my laptop...

The last thing. Congrats to my girlfriend. Today it is her 28th birthday. Hooray!

Good fun

The best WTF moments of 2005. I especally loved this comment:

A Whole Bunch of People Game Themselves to Death

The weird thing here isn't that people are dying while playing videogames. It's that we've already become so jaded about it that it's stopped being newsworthy when it happens. A WoW player starving to death is like the sun coming up in the morning. You can't throw a rock in Korea without hitting a cybercafe full of dead WoW players.

Planning you refactorings

So, it happened again. It is one of my starting game projects, and i just had to make a small refactor to extract a class. And before I knew it I was in hell. Creating more supporting classes, interfaces and implementing them, what have you. I was lucky this time, it was a "small" fix taking only an hour of concentrated work mostly fixing compiler bugs to see what I missed. But it could have been done better if I had been taking Martin Fowlers words seriously and done it in planned controlled steps.

The great part of this story is that I get to post my motto, which I haven't had the opportunity to do before!

It is not learning from you mistakes that is hard. It is applying that knowledge so that you don't make the mistake again.

Someday I'll learn and not end up doing what I did in december to the d20Sharp project that right now is in a non-compilable state somwhere in code-growing-cold limbo. I'll have to fix it soon.

The joys of old school windows programming

Yesterday I had this long debugging session that made me remember how much I love doing TDD. I have written about that C++ project I am working on - it was in that project where I had an issue with focusing that just didn't work properly. So I had to follow the windows messages around. Trace logging and what have you. I HATE THAT. I finally cracked the problem, but boy was I used up afterwards. The project is soon over and then I can go back to TDD C# programming.

Now there is probably some of you hard core C++ programmers that are saying: But why don't you do TDD with C++. You can do that! CppUnit! I have only the standard lame excuse: I didn't think there was time enough for me to learn how to use CppUnit on such a short, and probably one-time, project. I am not using C++ every day you know!. Well, the time spent debugging could have justified that. Allthough I had probably spent at least that time figuring out how the hell to test the issues I was having. And that brings me to what I think is one of the core issues for people learning TDD. Learning HOW to test things..

I read another blog (will try to find the link, think it was one of the FitNesse guys), that talked about "stupid test". Test that test for the obvious, which you usually have in abundance. The problem with these tests are that they do not test the object as it it supposed to be used, but only test things in thought out controlled scenarios. And when you get it out in the real project things fail anyway.

There is something right in that point. The first thing you do when learning TDD is to write black box testing of one class. A standard Modus Operandum that is easy to teach people is: Write at least one test for each contructor/method/property in the class. In my opinion that only adds real value when you test fringe cases. Those are the tests that help you aviod the hard-to-track bugs.

The next thing you do is design you objects properly for testing. That usually means being more aware of the Single Responsibility Principle (pdf) and doing
Dependency Injection. This opens a whole new set of issues where you mock the objects to be injected in order to test the object. One of the pitfalls I see there is when you incect objects that doesn't behave badly. Especially if the object you are mocking out is going to be a third party object out of your control that can (and then will) fail when doing complex real-world things, or when you want your injected objects to be subclasses - probably by others. Then you will probably see your object fail in new strange and wonderful ways if you don't test for it.

I have no solutions for this issue. But I think there are points to be aware of.

• Put you effort on your objects into testing border-line cases.


• Make your "controlled" testing environment as "real" as possible.


• Make tests where your injected objects behave badly.


• Do test for your third party components in the ways that you want to use them.

Hmmm... The last point was actually one that got me thinking. Great when you dig up ideas by blogging related ideas. I'll probably be diggin into that point more later.

Now. CYA. Have a badly behaving project to see to.

Another day. Another Acievement.

I can't stress enough how addictive it is with the achievement system on the XBox 360. Racking up gamer points that earn you bragging rights towards your friends is just so immensely cool. I really like looking at what my friends have been doing on their box when we do not have time to play online against eachother. As you may have noticed, I found out yesterday that you can get your gamer card to put live on your homepage. Neat O! So now you can all see - even without a 360 - and maybe you will get annoyed enough to go buy one, if they ever get widely available in stores, that is, and add me (Fehaare) to your friends list so we can compete.

I do miss some things on the box though though: A list of your friends ranked by gamer points and notifications when one of your friends beat your high score in a game. That would be good additions.

Sometimes it can be HARD to get things done

Especially when you have a lazy cat lounging on top of your computer... Other than that I have started the new year pretty well. Happy new year to all you frequent readers BTW. Now it is officially 2006, so the company can finally get started. Tomorrow I am going to speak with my lawyer and my bank too se how we are going to do things so I can get some starting captial - preferably without it costing me obscene amounts of interests! Not that I desperately need money in the company. I haven't got many need to have things that I well, NEED to have right now. So better save what I can for a the rainy days. My first jobs are going smoothly and more are getting added to the list, small ones, but still they mean money.
My business plan is also getting there. Especially I am working on a running plan where I can track my progress according to the goals I have set for the business in 2006. I think it is very imortant to have measurable goals, and be able to measure on them constantly. If you don't know where you stand, you have no idea where to put your efforts. Especially because I could easily get lost in just working my butt off for a lot of people and not getting any real work done on the games. And that would not be fruitful. One of my goals is that 5% of the income for 2006 have to come from games or game-related jobs. It is not a lot, but I expect it to be hard to get into the market, so I am content if it lands there.
Lastly, take a look at this great link that I shamelessly lifted from James Shores blog: Seven habits of highly eficient programmers. I think it is a good post that it is hard not to agree with. Maybe it doesn't bring many new things to the table, but it definately sums up some good practices.