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Refactoring: What You Need to Do It Right As certain as evolving requirements lead to code changes, code changes lead to code degradation. Therefore, code refactoring is critical to the long-term viability of all software products. Kevin Sawicki shares tips and tricks for refactoring to help developers identify code that needs refactoring, preserve the correct code history during refactoring sessions, and ensure that appropriate unit tests cover the refactored code. Kevin demonstrates the Eclipse open-source frameworks and Java-based tools, including EMMA for code coverage analysis and JUnit for unit testing. These tools not only make code refactoring less painful, they also empower developers to constantly improve their code through relentless refactoring. Kevin outlines a step-by-step process to find refactoring candidates, perform the refactorings in an isolated code branch, and collaborate with other developers to review the refactored code.
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Kevin Sawicki, Perforce Software
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Making Agile Work in Highly Regulated Environments Highly regulated industries-avionics suppliers, medical device companies, and pharmaceutical manufacturers-must meet rigorous quality standards to ensure their products are not a danger to the general public. Although compliance has traditionally been achieved with heavyweight waterfall or V-model development methodologies, you can implement agile-or lean-agile-development practices that adhere to standards-based regulations while reducing the risk and improving software quality and reliability. Colin Doyle identifies the constraints that agile and lean-agile software development approaches must address: traceability to clearly defined requirements, formal risk analysis and mitigation, and separation of roles between development and validation.
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Colin Doyle, MKS, Inc.
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A Test Odyssey: Building a High Performance, Distributed Team It seemed simple enough-hire the best available technical staff that would work from home to build some great software. Along the way, the team encountered the usual problems: time zone differences, communication headaches, and a surprising regression test monster. Matt Heusser describes how Socialtext built their high-performance development and test team, got the right people on the bus, built a culture of "assume good intent and then just do it," created the infrastructure to enable remote work, and employed a lightweight yet accountable process. Of course, the story has the impossible deadlines, conflicting expectations, unclear roles, and everything you'd get in many development projects. Matt shares how the team cut through the noise, including building a test framework integrated into the product, to achieve their product and quality aims.
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Matthew Heusser, Socialtext
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Using Test Automation Frameworks As you embark on implementing or improving automation within your testing process, you'll want to avoid the "Just Do It" attitude some have taken. Perhaps you've heard the term "test automation framework" and wondered what it means, what it does for testing, and if you need one. Andrew Pollner, who has developed automated testing frameworks for more than fifteen years, outlines how frameworks have grown up around test automation tools. Regardless of which automation tool you use, the concepts of a framework are similar. Andrew answers many of your questions: Why build a framework? What benefit does it provide? What does it cost to build a framework? What ROI can I expect when using a framework? Explore the different approaches to framework development and identify problems to watch out for to ensure the approach you take will provide years of productivity.
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Andrew Pollner, ALP International Corp
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