Here's one recent example of a significant bug.

The code said A is not NULL OrElse A != " ", which doesn't do anything useful. If A has non-NULL data, this is true. The second part of the clause (A != " ") is only evaluated if A is NULL. If A is NULL, no other …

See Scott Ambler's article in Dr. Dobb's Journal , "Scaling Test-Driven Development ".

Recently, I'd seen some notes in SD Times on a similar theme, and blogged that in Not Quite Following the Book .

Ambler's point seems to be the same as Coplien's: "High-level architecture sketches created during your Iteration 0 envisioning …

See Present Perfect for some thoughts on unit testing. See some other commentary on the discipline required to write Python programs in Gnome devs too lazy for python . I think I see the disconnect that makes testing appear to be too costly; I think that some basic "meta-quality attributes" are …

I can't find all of the Better Software Magazine articles on the Sticky Minds web site, so I can't provide a permalink. But look for "A Story About User Stories and Test Driven Development". It's good stuff, weighing out the good and bad features of "by-the-book" TDD.

Dr. Dobb's Journal …

When approaching reverse-engineering, we have to partition the big puddle of code into some useful pieces that we can manage intellectually, and will likely become parts of the resulting application. In some cases, this is either impossible or valueless. It may be that the application is so hopelessly bad that …

When I was a kid, reverse engineering a legacy application was a challenge. Tools were non-existent, and even a civilized practice like unit testing didn't really exist. Now that we have test driven development, I think we can apply this to reverse engineering the billions of lines of legacy software …

This is not a Python to the rescue story. This is a true, deeply horrible situation. I was rescued by a reframing technique I'll call Extraction.

First, the function had nested if's without enough else's -- the kind of thing that handles two of the four possible conditions.

if( a ) {
    if …

It's about 10,000 lines of C. Much of the C is focused on "framework" issues -- logging, synchronization, parsing the parameters and that kind of thing. In this case, it appears to be 30-50% of the original C code is stuff that is available in Java and can be removed …

The question seemed simple, which testing framework is the simplest? The situation is complex. There's a web application, there are developers and there are testers. The developers develop, and the testers test. So far, not so complex.

Here's the complexity. The testers are pretty focused on manual point-and-click testing. They …

I do a fair amount of manual refactoring. I've used WebSphere Studio (Eclipse) to do some automated refactoring, so I have some experience in using IDE's which exploit Java's static type-checking.

However, the question of type checking in a dynamic language is interesting. I don't use a sophisticated IDE for …