Tag: testing

  • Sufficiency In Software Testing

      When I was finishing up my B.S. I took a class in embedded software testing. The big assignment was to write the software that controls a single elevator, test the software to our satisfaction and deliver the whole shebang at the end of the semester. The critical lesson I learned from the course was…

  • Rails 2.0: selenium-on-rails routes.rb fix

    When I updated a few projects to Rails 2.0 last year, selenium-on-rails stopped working … some issue with routing and the lame way selenium-on-rails adds its routes. I didn’t spend the time to figure out exactly what the routing problem was, but did manage to hack a quick fix into routes.rb. This feels like the…

  • Rails 2.0: Testing For Well-Formed XML With assert_well_formed

    Here’s an easy way to validate that you’re always rendering well-formed HTML in an ordinary Rails application. I’ve written and verified this on Rails 2.0.1…

  • If A Unit Test Fails In The Woods, Does It Make A Sound?

    No, it doesn’t. Unit tests that execute a large amount of code but fail to make assertions along the way give you a false sense of confidence in the code. They pass when they should fail. These problems, formally known as type 2 errors, are a huge liability for a development team because the tests…