Noel Rappin Writes Here

Update

Beta 4 of Rails Test Prescriptions is now available, with two new chapters, one on Rcov and coverage in general, and one on writing better tests. Buy here.

While I’m in the self-promoting mode, the book is also available for pre-order at Amazon and other exciting locations.

More Promotion

And while I’m here, I should mention that Obtiva has updated their training schedule. Obtiva offers a 4-day Boot Camp for learning Rails and TDD that will next be offered August 2nd through 5th. There’s a brand-new Advanced Rails class that will be August 30th through September 2nd, and a version of the Boot Camp that meets weekly on Mondays starting September 20th.

Obtiva also offers private versions of our courses. See http://www.obtiva.com for more info.

Links

For some time, Joe Ferris had a fork of the Mocha mock-object tool that allowed mock spies, which let you separate the definition of a stub from the expectation of how the stubbed method will be called. This makes it easier to use mocked objects in a single-assertion test structure, and also makes mock tests easier to read. Anyway, Ferris has split out the spy part in a separate gem called Bourne, which should be easier to install alongside the standard Mocha gem. Yay.
(via Larkware)

Corey Haines would like us all to learn to type better, and toward that end is starting a community event for next week (July 12-18) for some collective support for learning. For as much as “Typing is not the Bottleneck”, which is true but not necessarily germane here, my experience is that programmers who are not great typists tend to be much more concerned with making their code concise at the expense of readability. Anything that eliminates friction between your head and the code is basically a good thing. (For the record, I mostly touch type, but I could stand to get faster and more accurate.)

Kent Beck has finished up his series on survey results about practices with a post on commit frequency and one on general practices. The general practices one is interesting, showing that about 50% of all respondents claim TDD, while about 70% claim to use iterations.

All of which sort of reminds me… a few years ago, when I worked at a major telecom company with a reputation for major waterfall development, I attended the “agile” track of an in-house seminar on software techniques in use at the company. Everybody in attendance there claimed to be agile, but only about 1/3 (by show of hands) were doing any kind of automated testing. It was, to say the least, a weird flavor of Agile. But I guess, you do what you can do and what works for your team.

Finally, I’ve been yammering here about iPad text editing and Dropbox for a few weeks, so I should mention Droptext, which seems to be the first iOS editor that saves and reads from Droptext. It’s rather minimal at the moment (and kind of crashy), but I suspect the mere fact that it reads Dropbox files means that it’s automatically useful.