Over the last few years I’ve been mostly blogging about various random topics. Most often those were related to Windsor, discussing its new and upcoming features, announcing releases, and taking in-depth look and its underpinning principles.
Another bucket was one-off posts discussing various aspects of software development, mostly out of larger context and not really caring if you, dear reader, have the experience and understanding of the topic or not.
Back to basics
Recently I had an interesting discussion with several people on twitter about basics. More precisely about basics behind writing tests.
It seems to me, and I’m guilty of that myself, that us, the developers, chasing the latest great thing forget about the basics. When was the last time you read a blogpost about the importance of testing? When was the last time you read about how to write tests, what to look out for, and how to keep the quality of your tests high and the maintenance cost low?
Several years ago I got a lot of value myself by reading blogs that taught me what is important in software, and I wouldn’t be the developer I am today, if it wasn’t for those people, who dedicated their time to share their experience and knowledge.
I may not be subscribing to the right blogs anymore, but I noticed those posts are much less frequent these days. To help fill the void I decided to concentrate a bit more on the fundamentals in the future, starting with what will hopefully evolve into a series of blogposts about tests.
Feedback
Do you think it’s a good idea? Any particular topics you would like me to emphasise, and areas to explore? Let me know in the comments. First post will be coming soon(ish).
Comments
I think this is a good idea. Those of us from the old alt.NET crowd consider a lot of these topics to be treaded ground, which is probably why we don’t see a lot of blogs about these things now-a-days. However, There is now a new generation of coders out there that need to be taught. They are either not finding the old blog posts or they consider them to be “too old.” Go for it!
I think is a must! I’ve been a developer for a while now but I still feel like a total newbie when it comes to testing. I really look forward to your posts on this topic.
Please do ! I’d love to read you on those topics !
I will follow this: With mocking, IoC, frameworks that have no interfaces (you know who you are MS EntityFramework) testing has moved on a LOT since nUnit checking a method returned the correct answer. If you can add code coverage (why’s and how’s) in there too??? Not asking to much? Lol