As part of a CiSE submission I'm working on, I interviewed the lead developer on a scientific software package today. This software package is mainly used for evolutionary studies, and has a small but devoted following - ~6 developers and ~12 users locally, plus a few dozen users outside of MSU …
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John Gall apparently said:
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with …read more
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My last post, Good code coverage: Necessity vs Sufficiency, about how you should maintain high code coverage with your automated tests, seems to have really struck a nerve in a small group of people -- I got some fantastic comments, with some great pointers. Michael Foord's comment, 'Too often "testing is …
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I get really frustrated with posts that claim your unit tests lie to you or 100% code coverage is fallacious or there are flaws in coverage measurement. These are sensationalist headlines that encourage bad behavior, by confusing new or inexperienced or argumentative or lazy developers: "well, we all know test …
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The ongoing debate about doctests (here, and links therein) seems to me to be somewhat silly.
doctests should be assessed by their utility to you and your project, in whatever role you happen to be using them. I personally find them to be very useful in API documentation, where they …
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As a new prof, I've been too busy to blog much. What am I doing?
Apart from all the normal academic crud (meeting with people, answering e-mail, doing paperwork, etc.) and parenting & home ownership stuff, I've been teaching my Intro to Database-Backed Web Programming course. This has been neither a …
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