When coding, users always have to be conscious about the way their code may be implemented or used in the future by different services leading to potential misuse. After reading Code Health: Make Interfaces Hard to Misuse by Marek Kiszkis, it made me think about how important communication between testing code is.
I found this content useful because Kiszkis featured some examples that can show how an interface could be misused easily. The examples included:
- Requiring callers to call an initialization function
- Requiring callers to perform custom cleanup
- Allowing code paths that create objects without required parameters
- Allowing parameters for which only some values are valid, especially if it is possible to use a more appropriate type
It is also good to remember that at the end of the day, code should be defensive but not too defensive to the point that complexity is increased and performance overall is reduced. Kiszkis says “it is not always practical to have a foolproof interface” because there will be situations where some requirements are things that cannot be expressed in an interface.
After seeing so much content based on being careful about what you code it is surprising how this article says it is not necessary to plan too hard. I kind of understand why Kiszkis would say this but personally, I kind of disagree with this. The reason why I disagree is because if someone does happen to end up with more time to work on something than expected and they know it will make something more efficient, then why not go for it?
Overall, I appreciated what was shared in this article in terms of encouraging users to try and see issues that can arise with their code when it comes to interfaces. The main takeaway for me is that if something is brought up, or triggered by undefined behavior, a user should try and make it impossible for this to happen. A way of doing so is by adding things where necessary, like certain slots in his example. It does not have to be too specific but detailed enough so that it covers different aspects, similar to how we try to prepare for everything when it comes to equivalence class testing.
Article: https://testing.googleblog.com/2018/07/code-health-make-interfaces-hard-to.html
From the blog CS@Worcester by samanthatran and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.
If you happen to be reading this page translated from English to another language, hello there, you are one of the main characters of this blog post. Without linguistics, the study of language and its structure, we probably would not be able to figure out how to communicate everything we need to globally while being able to understand it at the same time while testing. There are so many online resources that cover what a specific country or region in a country uses in terms of data formats for their computer systems.
Over the weekend, I had the chance to sit down and listen to another podcast episode by Developer Things. The title, Women in Technology (with Megan Horton), caught my eye as I am always on the lookout to learn about other women’s experiences in technology.
Imagine being several years into your role as a developer; you’ve had a long week, a big project to push tomorrow and suddenly… you’re stuck on something. And you’ve double-triple-quadruple checked to make sure everything is working by code review but you cannot put your finger on how it is not quite perfect. What’s wrong? Let’s find out.
A few weeks ago, I was introduced to JUnit testing in my Software Quality Assurance & Testing course. The blog post tutorial linked below is one I would recommend to those interested in learning about assertion. Reading this post has helped me review the concepts I have learned and I will share what helped me better understand the topic of writing basic assertions with AssertJ.
In my software design course, I recently learned about how using design patterns helps you code better. I thought it would be a good review to go over the concepts this article introduces and potentially link it to things from class and maybe even add some things we did not get through during class.
“Forget about automating your regression tests” is some bold advice from Bas Dijkstra, who has experience as a test automation consultant. It made me wonder what exactly led him to making this kind of statement on regression test scripts and his article, On Ending the Regression Automation Fixation, covered various reasons why.
As someone who will be graduating within the next year, I’m always interested in what software development is currently like. Ekaterina Novoseltseva uses some 2018 statistics and presents interesting facts about software development through Apiumhub—which is a software development company based in Barcelona. The data in this article comes from a collection of over 300 answers from different countries around the world; starting with the challenges in software development.
After learning some life lessons through the pages I’ve skimmed from my copy of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey; this article’s version for software developers in test caught my eye. What exactly are the seven highly effective habits of SDETs? Here are the seven habits that Angie Jones, a senior developer advocate at Applitools, wrote about: being intentional, enhancing development skills, enhancing testing skills, exploring new tools, automating throughout the product’s tech stack, collaborating, and automating beyond the tests.
According to music artists, two is better than one. When it comes to designing code that has two parts, this may not be the case. In Max Kanat-Alexander’s article, he explains how he has a personal rule of needing to know how generic his code needs to be. He describes it as if he were designing an audio decoder and started out with supporting WAV files and then later needed to add support for MP3 files. His solution was for what he only needed on its own instead of having to copy and paste the common parts for the format; he emphasizes that “it’s not just two implementations that are bad, but also two locations.” Another rule Kanat-Alexander has for helping this stay consistent is to create code well enough to ensure you would ideally never have to go back and change it if another part of the code has to be modified.