JUnit Blues

Hello!

 

With the semester wrapping up pretty quickly, and our last homework assignment being to design an in-class assignment, I’ve been doing some brushing up on JUnit testing. Specifically, assertions, which are the crux of how JUnit tests work, by telling a given test what qualifies as a pass or fail. The assignment me and my groupmates designed revolved around the use of various different kinds of assertions, ones that we didn’t cover heavily in class. 

 As such, this week my blog of choice to read revolves around, what else, JUnit testing. Specifically, the article comes from Medium, who I’ve looked at before, and who seem to be quite the useful resource on covering both broad and specific computer science topics. I wanted to take a look at this specific article, mostly because I wanted to see some of the other topics involved with JUnit that we didn’t cover in class. I intend on running Linux on my main PC once the semester ends, and seeing how to install JUnit on specific hardware instead of importing it as a library is pretty interesting! I am very used to just pulling a library from the top of a piece of code, I am not very well versed in actually installing libraries. Granted, this is the kind of thing that Docker and VS Code are made to circumvent, as you can set it to auto install or include certain dependencies. I also enjoyed reading some of the specific recommendations for writing JUnit specific tests. Some of them we kind of touched on in class already, but it is always nice to keep myself fresh on these kinds of things. Keep tests simple and focused, avoid possible edge cases, the list goes on. Something we didn’t touch on at all in class is the various debugging modes found in JUnit, like JDWP and Standard Streams, which can be useful in troubleshooting a program. Standard Streams for instance places every print that would normally go to the main console, but redirects it to the output strea, which can be useful for seeing exactly what is going on with a program. This kind of angle to me is interesting, as I strongly associate testing with debugging, but we didn’t necessarily cover debugging very thoroughly in class, so perhaps that is something I can look up on my own time. 

 I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time in this class, some things were a little dry like the Boundary testing near the beginning of the semester, but a lot of the things we learned, like JUnit testing or unit testing in general I can see myself using regularly in industry, and I don’t think I am wrong in thinking that. 

Thank you for reading my blog!

Camille

 

Blog Post: https://medium.com/@abhaykhs/junit-a-complete-guide-83470e717dce

 

From the blog Camille's Cluttered Closet by Camille and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

JUnit Blues

Hello!

 

With the semester wrapping up pretty quickly, and our last homework assignment being to design an in-class assignment, I’ve been doing some brushing up on JUnit testing. Specifically, assertions, which are the crux of how JUnit tests work, by telling a given test what qualifies as a pass or fail. The assignment me and my groupmates designed revolved around the use of various different kinds of assertions, ones that we didn’t cover heavily in class. 

 As such, this week my blog of choice to read revolves around, what else, JUnit testing. Specifically, the article comes from Medium, who I’ve looked at before, and who seem to be quite the useful resource on covering both broad and specific computer science topics. I wanted to take a look at this specific article, mostly because I wanted to see some of the other topics involved with JUnit that we didn’t cover in class. I intend on running Linux on my main PC once the semester ends, and seeing how to install JUnit on specific hardware instead of importing it as a library is pretty interesting! I am very used to just pulling a library from the top of a piece of code, I am not very well versed in actually installing libraries. Granted, this is the kind of thing that Docker and VS Code are made to circumvent, as you can set it to auto install or include certain dependencies. I also enjoyed reading some of the specific recommendations for writing JUnit specific tests. Some of them we kind of touched on in class already, but it is always nice to keep myself fresh on these kinds of things. Keep tests simple and focused, avoid possible edge cases, the list goes on. Something we didn’t touch on at all in class is the various debugging modes found in JUnit, like JDWP and Standard Streams, which can be useful in troubleshooting a program. Standard Streams for instance places every print that would normally go to the main console, but redirects it to the output strea, which can be useful for seeing exactly what is going on with a program. This kind of angle to me is interesting, as I strongly associate testing with debugging, but we didn’t necessarily cover debugging very thoroughly in class, so perhaps that is something I can look up on my own time. 

 I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time in this class, some things were a little dry like the Boundary testing near the beginning of the semester, but a lot of the things we learned, like JUnit testing or unit testing in general I can see myself using regularly in industry, and I don’t think I am wrong in thinking that. 

Thank you for reading my blog!

Camille

 

Blog Post: https://medium.com/@abhaykhs/junit-a-complete-guide-83470e717dce

 

From the blog Camille's Cluttered Closet by Camille and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

JUnit Blues

Hello!

 

With the semester wrapping up pretty quickly, and our last homework assignment being to design an in-class assignment, I’ve been doing some brushing up on JUnit testing. Specifically, assertions, which are the crux of how JUnit tests work, by telling a given test what qualifies as a pass or fail. The assignment me and my groupmates designed revolved around the use of various different kinds of assertions, ones that we didn’t cover heavily in class. 

 As such, this week my blog of choice to read revolves around, what else, JUnit testing. Specifically, the article comes from Medium, who I’ve looked at before, and who seem to be quite the useful resource on covering both broad and specific computer science topics. I wanted to take a look at this specific article, mostly because I wanted to see some of the other topics involved with JUnit that we didn’t cover in class. I intend on running Linux on my main PC once the semester ends, and seeing how to install JUnit on specific hardware instead of importing it as a library is pretty interesting! I am very used to just pulling a library from the top of a piece of code, I am not very well versed in actually installing libraries. Granted, this is the kind of thing that Docker and VS Code are made to circumvent, as you can set it to auto install or include certain dependencies. I also enjoyed reading some of the specific recommendations for writing JUnit specific tests. Some of them we kind of touched on in class already, but it is always nice to keep myself fresh on these kinds of things. Keep tests simple and focused, avoid possible edge cases, the list goes on. Something we didn’t touch on at all in class is the various debugging modes found in JUnit, like JDWP and Standard Streams, which can be useful in troubleshooting a program. Standard Streams for instance places every print that would normally go to the main console, but redirects it to the output strea, which can be useful for seeing exactly what is going on with a program. This kind of angle to me is interesting, as I strongly associate testing with debugging, but we didn’t necessarily cover debugging very thoroughly in class, so perhaps that is something I can look up on my own time. 

 I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time in this class, some things were a little dry like the Boundary testing near the beginning of the semester, but a lot of the things we learned, like JUnit testing or unit testing in general I can see myself using regularly in industry, and I don’t think I am wrong in thinking that. 

Thank you for reading my blog!

Camille

 

Blog Post: https://medium.com/@abhaykhs/junit-a-complete-guide-83470e717dce

 

From the blog Camille's Cluttered Closet by Camille and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

JUnit Blues

Hello!

 

With the semester wrapping up pretty quickly, and our last homework assignment being to design an in-class assignment, I’ve been doing some brushing up on JUnit testing. Specifically, assertions, which are the crux of how JUnit tests work, by telling a given test what qualifies as a pass or fail. The assignment me and my groupmates designed revolved around the use of various different kinds of assertions, ones that we didn’t cover heavily in class. 

 As such, this week my blog of choice to read revolves around, what else, JUnit testing. Specifically, the article comes from Medium, who I’ve looked at before, and who seem to be quite the useful resource on covering both broad and specific computer science topics. I wanted to take a look at this specific article, mostly because I wanted to see some of the other topics involved with JUnit that we didn’t cover in class. I intend on running Linux on my main PC once the semester ends, and seeing how to install JUnit on specific hardware instead of importing it as a library is pretty interesting! I am very used to just pulling a library from the top of a piece of code, I am not very well versed in actually installing libraries. Granted, this is the kind of thing that Docker and VS Code are made to circumvent, as you can set it to auto install or include certain dependencies. I also enjoyed reading some of the specific recommendations for writing JUnit specific tests. Some of them we kind of touched on in class already, but it is always nice to keep myself fresh on these kinds of things. Keep tests simple and focused, avoid possible edge cases, the list goes on. Something we didn’t touch on at all in class is the various debugging modes found in JUnit, like JDWP and Standard Streams, which can be useful in troubleshooting a program. Standard Streams for instance places every print that would normally go to the main console, but redirects it to the output strea, which can be useful for seeing exactly what is going on with a program. This kind of angle to me is interesting, as I strongly associate testing with debugging, but we didn’t necessarily cover debugging very thoroughly in class, so perhaps that is something I can look up on my own time. 

 I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time in this class, some things were a little dry like the Boundary testing near the beginning of the semester, but a lot of the things we learned, like JUnit testing or unit testing in general I can see myself using regularly in industry, and I don’t think I am wrong in thinking that. 

Thank you for reading my blog!

Camille

 

Blog Post: https://medium.com/@abhaykhs/junit-a-complete-guide-83470e717dce

 

From the blog Camille's Cluttered Closet by Camille and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

JUnit Blues

Hello!

 

With the semester wrapping up pretty quickly, and our last homework assignment being to design an in-class assignment, I’ve been doing some brushing up on JUnit testing. Specifically, assertions, which are the crux of how JUnit tests work, by telling a given test what qualifies as a pass or fail. The assignment me and my groupmates designed revolved around the use of various different kinds of assertions, ones that we didn’t cover heavily in class. 

 As such, this week my blog of choice to read revolves around, what else, JUnit testing. Specifically, the article comes from Medium, who I’ve looked at before, and who seem to be quite the useful resource on covering both broad and specific computer science topics. I wanted to take a look at this specific article, mostly because I wanted to see some of the other topics involved with JUnit that we didn’t cover in class. I intend on running Linux on my main PC once the semester ends, and seeing how to install JUnit on specific hardware instead of importing it as a library is pretty interesting! I am very used to just pulling a library from the top of a piece of code, I am not very well versed in actually installing libraries. Granted, this is the kind of thing that Docker and VS Code are made to circumvent, as you can set it to auto install or include certain dependencies. I also enjoyed reading some of the specific recommendations for writing JUnit specific tests. Some of them we kind of touched on in class already, but it is always nice to keep myself fresh on these kinds of things. Keep tests simple and focused, avoid possible edge cases, the list goes on. Something we didn’t touch on at all in class is the various debugging modes found in JUnit, like JDWP and Standard Streams, which can be useful in troubleshooting a program. Standard Streams for instance places every print that would normally go to the main console, but redirects it to the output strea, which can be useful for seeing exactly what is going on with a program. This kind of angle to me is interesting, as I strongly associate testing with debugging, but we didn’t necessarily cover debugging very thoroughly in class, so perhaps that is something I can look up on my own time. 

 I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time in this class, some things were a little dry like the Boundary testing near the beginning of the semester, but a lot of the things we learned, like JUnit testing or unit testing in general I can see myself using regularly in industry, and I don’t think I am wrong in thinking that. 

Thank you for reading my blog!

Camille

 

Blog Post: https://medium.com/@abhaykhs/junit-a-complete-guide-83470e717dce

 

From the blog Camille's Cluttered Closet by Camille and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

JUnit Blues

Hello!

 

With the semester wrapping up pretty quickly, and our last homework assignment being to design an in-class assignment, I’ve been doing some brushing up on JUnit testing. Specifically, assertions, which are the crux of how JUnit tests work, by telling a given test what qualifies as a pass or fail. The assignment me and my groupmates designed revolved around the use of various different kinds of assertions, ones that we didn’t cover heavily in class. 

 As such, this week my blog of choice to read revolves around, what else, JUnit testing. Specifically, the article comes from Medium, who I’ve looked at before, and who seem to be quite the useful resource on covering both broad and specific computer science topics. I wanted to take a look at this specific article, mostly because I wanted to see some of the other topics involved with JUnit that we didn’t cover in class. I intend on running Linux on my main PC once the semester ends, and seeing how to install JUnit on specific hardware instead of importing it as a library is pretty interesting! I am very used to just pulling a library from the top of a piece of code, I am not very well versed in actually installing libraries. Granted, this is the kind of thing that Docker and VS Code are made to circumvent, as you can set it to auto install or include certain dependencies. I also enjoyed reading some of the specific recommendations for writing JUnit specific tests. Some of them we kind of touched on in class already, but it is always nice to keep myself fresh on these kinds of things. Keep tests simple and focused, avoid possible edge cases, the list goes on. Something we didn’t touch on at all in class is the various debugging modes found in JUnit, like JDWP and Standard Streams, which can be useful in troubleshooting a program. Standard Streams for instance places every print that would normally go to the main console, but redirects it to the output strea, which can be useful for seeing exactly what is going on with a program. This kind of angle to me is interesting, as I strongly associate testing with debugging, but we didn’t necessarily cover debugging very thoroughly in class, so perhaps that is something I can look up on my own time. 

 I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time in this class, some things were a little dry like the Boundary testing near the beginning of the semester, but a lot of the things we learned, like JUnit testing or unit testing in general I can see myself using regularly in industry, and I don’t think I am wrong in thinking that. 

Thank you for reading my blog!

Camille

 

Blog Post: https://medium.com/@abhaykhs/junit-a-complete-guide-83470e717dce

 

From the blog Camille's Cluttered Closet by Camille and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

JUnit Blues

Hello!

 

With the semester wrapping up pretty quickly, and our last homework assignment being to design an in-class assignment, I’ve been doing some brushing up on JUnit testing. Specifically, assertions, which are the crux of how JUnit tests work, by telling a given test what qualifies as a pass or fail. The assignment me and my groupmates designed revolved around the use of various different kinds of assertions, ones that we didn’t cover heavily in class. 

 As such, this week my blog of choice to read revolves around, what else, JUnit testing. Specifically, the article comes from Medium, who I’ve looked at before, and who seem to be quite the useful resource on covering both broad and specific computer science topics. I wanted to take a look at this specific article, mostly because I wanted to see some of the other topics involved with JUnit that we didn’t cover in class. I intend on running Linux on my main PC once the semester ends, and seeing how to install JUnit on specific hardware instead of importing it as a library is pretty interesting! I am very used to just pulling a library from the top of a piece of code, I am not very well versed in actually installing libraries. Granted, this is the kind of thing that Docker and VS Code are made to circumvent, as you can set it to auto install or include certain dependencies. I also enjoyed reading some of the specific recommendations for writing JUnit specific tests. Some of them we kind of touched on in class already, but it is always nice to keep myself fresh on these kinds of things. Keep tests simple and focused, avoid possible edge cases, the list goes on. Something we didn’t touch on at all in class is the various debugging modes found in JUnit, like JDWP and Standard Streams, which can be useful in troubleshooting a program. Standard Streams for instance places every print that would normally go to the main console, but redirects it to the output strea, which can be useful for seeing exactly what is going on with a program. This kind of angle to me is interesting, as I strongly associate testing with debugging, but we didn’t necessarily cover debugging very thoroughly in class, so perhaps that is something I can look up on my own time. 

 I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time in this class, some things were a little dry like the Boundary testing near the beginning of the semester, but a lot of the things we learned, like JUnit testing or unit testing in general I can see myself using regularly in industry, and I don’t think I am wrong in thinking that. 

Thank you for reading my blog!

Camille

 

Blog Post: https://medium.com/@abhaykhs/junit-a-complete-guide-83470e717dce

 

From the blog Camille's Cluttered Closet by Camille and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Testing Smells

For the last homework in the course, we were assigned the task as a group to create a lesson plan for the class to do and put it in a POGIL activity. My group sat for a while throwing around ideas before I came across something called testing smells/code smells. Testing smells, also known as code smells, which refer to issues and/or warning signs in an individual’s code that won’t necessarily throw an error or cause the code not to run but likely leads to some bigger issue that would cause fundamental problems in the code. 

Code smells come in all shapes and sizes and often seem harmless or meaningless such as reusing variable names, repeating lines of code, hard coding data and more. Testing smells typically refers to code smells that occur specifically in the testing files. These mistakes affect the validity, functionality, and reliability of a test. 

Since the whole purpose of testing is to check for problems or potential issues in the code, testing smells is a serious issue that is worth learning about. I watched this video on youtube called, “a few common code smells to be aware of and how to fix them”. 

In this video, the individual talks about how testing smells can often point to bigger problems in the code which are important to pay attention to. The first code smell that is mentioned in the video is long functions. The video explains how long functions may seem harmless at first, especially to programmers that are first starting out, but the purpose of a function is to perform one task simply and directly. Long functions often do more than one thing, making them complex and convoluted, therefore more prone to causing bugs in the program. This also makes them more difficult to maintain and to fix.

Another testing smell mentioned is duplicate code. Duplicate code is another testing smell that seems harmless because from a technical standpoint, although a tedious task, does it really matter if you rewrite the same line 30 times? While it is true that if you do this perfectly the functionality of the code shouldn’t be affected, the code will still become messy and unreadable. Additionally, repeating code in this manner increases the likelihood of making a mistake. Turning repeat code into a function or having them inherit from a shared class not only improves cleanliness and readability but prevents simple and clerical errors that would cause frustration at a later point in the coding process.

Overall, Testing smells is something that I believe is an important subject matter worth learning about in order to improve coding ability both on a personal and professional level.

From the blog CS@Worcester – The Struggle of Being a Female Student in CS by Noam Horn and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Sprint 3 Retrospective

In this post, I’ll be reflecting on our third and final sprint towards developing and implementing an Identity and Access Management system for Thea’s Pantry. Coming out of Sprint 2, we had an almost-fully-functional proof of concept which integrated a mock frontend capable of calling out to Keycloak to require authentication, getting an access token, and passing that token to the backend for authentication and validation. Our goal for sprint 3 was to fully implement production microservices for Keycloak, the IAMBackend, and the IAMFrontend. These goals may not have been explicitly defined like that at the beginning of the sprint, but that ended up being our objective. We also wanted to have finalized documentation that explains our implementation and design choices.

Some of my personal work towards that goal was as follows:

GitLab

  • Documenting our low-level issues in GitLab and assigning them accordingly. I put additional focus/effort this sprint into properly linking related issues, blockers, and tracking various key information in comments, as opposed to just using issues as a task list. Epic

  • Document and ticket/issue any outstanding work that is necessary but out of the time constraints of this sprint / the semester. Approaching the end of the semester, there is still some necessary work to fully implement our microservices, but there is not enough time to complete it all. I have gone through and added any issues I can think of.

Backend

  • Fully implement an IAMBackend that mirrors the structure of the GuestInfoBackend. It is not yet merged, as it is not yet a fully functional MVP. That branch is here. This has included but was not limited to work such as:

    • Refactoring comments and text to apply to an IAMBackend instead of GuestInfoBackend

    • Removing files and code that does not apply to IAMBackend, such as messageBroker.js

    • Modifying backend endpoint code to finalize it

    • Updating dependencies

    • Ensuring the GitLab build processes function as expected

  • I will be tying up some loose ends and hopefully merging IAMBackend before “finishing” the semester.

Frontend

  • Fully implement an IAMFrontend that mirrors the structure of the GuestInfoFrontend. It is not yet merged, as it is not yet a fully functional MVP. That branch is here. This has included but was not limited to work such as:

    • Refactoring comments and text to apply to an IAMFrontend instead of GuestInfoFrontend

    • Updating dependencies

    • Ensuring the GitLab build processes function as expected

    • Adding and reconfiguring bin scripts as necessary

    • Doing frontend Vue work to actually create a redirect page

  • I will be tying up some loose ends and hopefully merging IAMFrontend before “finishing” the semester.

PantryKeycloak

Just providing a link to the repository because I am the only one that has touched it, all work in there was done by me. PantryKeycloak

  • Fully configure and implement a production Keycloak repository

  • Add all custom settings for the TheasPantry Realm

  • Create an entrypoint script that automatically exports and saves all changes to the realm

Documentation

Documentation Repository

  • Finalize and write a lot of documentation

I feel like this sprint was a rough one across the board. I could definitely tell people were on the home stretch and sliding towards the end of the semester. I think people did good work, and our class meetings worked well for us; we always came to agreements and had purpose. I feel like we were working very slowly though, and at times, I felt like I was taking the bulk of the issues on myself. I think I could work on that as an individual, and understand that it is not necessarily my job to make sure every single thing gets done. I am very mission-oriented, so I naturally do that, despite the cost to myself. I feel like as a team, we could have paid more attention to each other and what people’s workloads looked like. That might have allowed us to work better together and be more mindful of our own deadlines and how we can help each other.

The pattern I have chosen for this sprint is Dig Deeper. This pattern describes learning things at a level where you truly understand why they are the way they are, how they work, and how to use them. I think it is relevant because the more I tried to learn how the different services and Docker interact, the better I was able to understand and implement solutions. If I had read this prior, I may have focused more on understanding before trying to implement, as opposed to while.

From the blog Mr. Lancer 987's Blog by Mr. Lancer 987 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Sprint 3 Retrospective

In this post, I’ll be reflecting on our third and final sprint towards developing and implementing an Identity and Access Management system for Thea’s Pantry. Coming out of Sprint 2, we had an almost-fully-functional proof of concept which integrated a mock frontend capable of calling out to Keycloak to require authentication, getting an access token, and passing that token to the backend for authentication and validation. Our goal for sprint 3 was to fully implement production microservices for Keycloak, the IAMBackend, and the IAMFrontend. These goals may not have been explicitly defined like that at the beginning of the sprint, but that ended up being our objective. We also wanted to have finalized documentation that explains our implementation and design choices.

Some of my personal work towards that goal was as follows:

GitLab

  • Documenting our low-level issues in GitLab and assigning them accordingly. I put additional focus/effort this sprint into properly linking related issues, blockers, and tracking various key information in comments, as opposed to just using issues as a task list. Epic

  • Document and ticket/issue any outstanding work that is necessary but out of the time constraints of this sprint / the semester. Approaching the end of the semester, there is still some necessary work to fully implement our microservices, but there is not enough time to complete it all. I have gone through and added any issues I can think of.

Backend

  • Fully implement an IAMBackend that mirrors the structure of the GuestInfoBackend. It is not yet merged, as it is not yet a fully functional MVP. That branch is here. This has included but was not limited to work such as:

    • Refactoring comments and text to apply to an IAMBackend instead of GuestInfoBackend

    • Removing files and code that does not apply to IAMBackend, such as messageBroker.js

    • Modifying backend endpoint code to finalize it

    • Updating dependencies

    • Ensuring the GitLab build processes function as expected

  • I will be tying up some loose ends and hopefully merging IAMBackend before “finishing” the semester.

Frontend

  • Fully implement an IAMFrontend that mirrors the structure of the GuestInfoFrontend. It is not yet merged, as it is not yet a fully functional MVP. That branch is here. This has included but was not limited to work such as:

    • Refactoring comments and text to apply to an IAMFrontend instead of GuestInfoFrontend

    • Updating dependencies

    • Ensuring the GitLab build processes function as expected

    • Adding and reconfiguring bin scripts as necessary

    • Doing frontend Vue work to actually create a redirect page

  • I will be tying up some loose ends and hopefully merging IAMFrontend before “finishing” the semester.

PantryKeycloak

Just providing a link to the repository because I am the only one that has touched it, all work in there was done by me. PantryKeycloak

  • Fully configure and implement a production Keycloak repository

  • Add all custom settings for the TheasPantry Realm

  • Create an entrypoint script that automatically exports and saves all changes to the realm

Documentation

Documentation Repository

  • Finalize and write a lot of documentation

I feel like this sprint was a rough one across the board. I could definitely tell people were on the home stretch and sliding towards the end of the semester. I think people did good work, and our class meetings worked well for us; we always came to agreements and had purpose. I feel like we were working very slowly though, and at times, I felt like I was taking the bulk of the issues on myself. I think I could work on that as an individual, and understand that it is not necessarily my job to make sure every single thing gets done. I am very mission-oriented, so I naturally do that, despite the cost to myself. I feel like as a team, we could have paid more attention to each other and what people’s workloads looked like. That might have allowed us to work better together and be more mindful of our own deadlines and how we can help each other.

The pattern I have chosen for this sprint is Dig Deeper. This pattern describes learning things at a level where you truly understand why they are the way they are, how they work, and how to use them. I think it is relevant because the more I tried to learn how the different services and Docker interact, the better I was able to understand and implement solutions. If I had read this prior, I may have focused more on understanding before trying to implement, as opposed to while.

From the blog Mr. Lancer 987's Blog by Mr. Lancer 987 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.