After talking about some experience with legacy modernization (or migration), I received information from Blue Phoenix about their approach to modernization.

Before talking about modernization, it's important to think about the following issue from two points of view.

Modernization can amount to nothing more than Paving the Cowpaths.

From a …

Some background:

I was vaguely pointed at one call in an API, via a 2-page "tutorial" that uses CURL examples. Told "Test this some more." by the guy who'd been doing some amount (none?) of hand "success path" testing via CURL. This has since morphed into "regression testing things, all …

Unit testing RESTful web services is rather complex. Ideally, the services are tested in isolation before being packaged as a service.

However, sometimes people will want to test the "finished" or "integrated" web services technology stack because (I suppose) they don't trust their lower-level unit tests.

Or they don't have …

Just updated the Stingray Reader. There was an egregious error (and a missing test case). I fixed the error, but didn't add a test case to cover the problem. It's simple laziness. TDD is quite clear on how to tackle this kind of thing. Write the missing test case (which …

Years ago, when designing an interface to a vendor's web services, I did the following. This isn't a genius move, but it's worth emphasizing how important it is. And what's most important isn't technical.

1. I built a simple spike solution to access their service.
2. I morphed this into a "sanity …

Folks like to claim that unit testing absolutely requires each class be tested in isolation using mocks for all dependencies. This is a noble aspiration, but doesn't work out perfectly well in Python.

First, "unit" is intentionally vague. It could be a class, a function, a module or a package …

Another case study on TDRE.

Provided: 2,938 lines of Python code which process a handful of large files to create a number of outputs. [Details can't be disclosed.]

Objective: Refactor to distinguish between the overall sequence of transformational steps and the details of each individual step.

In "Unit Test Case, Subject Matter Experts and Requirements" I suggested that it's often pretty easy to get a spreadsheet of full-worked out examples from subject-matter experts. Indeed, if your following TDD, that spreadsheet of examples is solid gold.

Let's consider something relatively simple. Let's say we're working on some …

Here's a typical "I don't like TDD" question: the topic is "Does TDD really work for complex projects?"

Part of the question focused on the difficulty of preparing test cases that cover the requirements. In particular, there was some hand-wringing over conflicting and contradictory requirements.

Here's what's worked for me …