Here's a recipe for transforming a pile of similarly-formatted source spreadsheets into a suite of unittest test cases.

The customer sent a screen grab from an accounting desktop application with a couple of rows highlighted. They claim that the application I reverse engineered from C and rewrote in Java didn't work for this one case.

Step 1. Get clarification on the screen grab information. The data labels don't …

An old professor of mine writes "There are lots of pathological propensities at work ..., "Gee, we've got a way to use the computer to ..." In short, automation for the sake of automation."

See jbox.dk Quotations on Simplicity . The fundamental principle is that simplicity is really important. But how do …

In the Small Not-for-Profit Web Presence posting, I identified a software portfolio for a small NFP. Basically, it was a list of cheap (or free) web resources that would provide a solid web presence with relatively low cost. More importantly, it would move them off a legacy web presence that …

Here's a great summary of Agile techniques. It's in ComputerWorld's Development section, in an article by Heather Havenstein: "Five Web 2.0 app dev lessons for enterprise IT ". I think the article is mis-titled, since it's basically "Agile for Big IT."

Some of the five techniques are motherhood and apple-pie …

Let's talk about a Small Not For Profit that has a number of web assets, but a web presence that isn't working well.

First, they have a Domain Name (pretend it's www.smallnfp.org). They have an associated organization which is hosting their web site. Let's call them the Associated …

Two recent conversations with the Non-Compromisers.

NC: "I can't use Yahoo! mail"

Me: "What?"

NC: "Yahoo! mail has a "Home" tab which isn't the inbox. It always lands there."

Me: "Yep. That's a javascript thing. The tab isn't bookmarkable."

NC: "The fact that I can't land directly on the "Inbox …

The requirements are a sequence diagram showing a complex back-and-forth with the vendor's web service. Each request and reply is detailed, but there's no overview or summary stated. It's implied, and all of the business folks can articulate it, but no one wrote any of it down.

This looks like …

REST is cool because there's less protocol there -- little more than HTTP and some kind of representation for objects (XML, JSON or whatever.) It seems to me that REST with JSON is a very lightweight approach to implementing web services. Doing this in Python further trims down the technology stack …

The problem is this: parsing HTML from a variety of sources to create pleasant, easy-to-manipulate spreadsheets. HTML can represent the same data in a variety of ways, even within a single web site. What we have are several layers of parsing; layers which must be linked with increasingly simplified intermediate …