In this article I want to talk about a term that I think is just brilliant: technical debt! The term technical debt makes an analogy: it considers the use of quick, but poor, technical solutions to store up a form of debt. As with more conventional forms of debt, the immediate problem is solved, but Read more…
In this article I want to look at the essential characteristics that objects have, namely those of state, behaviour and identity. This article follows on from my my What is an Object? article of a while ago, when I offered the following definition of what an object is: An object is a physical manifestation of Read more…
I’ve written a few articles about unit testing on this blog, but so far they’ve been about how to go about doing so and what supporting libraries/frameworks are available. Now I want to look at why unit testing is a good idea. In particular, this article will focus on the business perspective. Many software developers Read more…
At the end of my previous article Pros and Cons of Using the C assert Macro for Unit Testing in C/C++ I promised to follow up with an article summarising the popular unit testing libraries/frameworks. In this article I will give that summary: For the .NET languages there is NUnit. Although the source code is Read more…
This is a short follow-up to my recent article A Very Simple Introduction to Unit Testing. In that article I described the development of a very simple unit test for a very simple C++ class. To do this I used the C/C++ assert() macro, saying the following about it: "…although assert wasn’t originally intended for Read more…