Mocks Aren't Stubs by Martin Fowler, is a very comprehensive look at two pairs of issues in testing: state-based verification vs behavior verification, and classical TDD vs Mockist TDD.

Some developers are easily test-infected - they take to unit testing like a duck to water. Others need some time and encouragement, but eventually "get it". A third group appears to have immunity to test infection. I invent a test-gene model to categorize these groups and look at its implications for the future of developer/unit testing.

In light of the recent conversations about the adoption of developer testing on the junit list and Artima, this Turing Award lecture by Robert Floyd seems particularly appropriate. There's a particularly good quote where he is discussing a quote from Thomas Kuhn in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions."

"Again from Kuhn:

"The older schools gradually disappear. In part their disappearance is caused by their members’ conversion to the new paradigm. But there are always some men who cling to one or another of the older views, and they are simply read out of the profession, which thereafter ignores their work."

In computing, there is no mechanism for reading such men out of the profession. I suspect they mainly become managers of software development. "

I've been so self-absorbed with my travel travails that I forgot to mention I'll be part of a webinar tomorrow morning on the Business Benefits of Unit Testing with Forrester anaylst (and seemly very nice person) Carey Schwaber. I had read some of her previous reporting on the build market, because of her mention of CruiseControl, and meeting her in person confirmed what had come across in her reports: she's pretty clueful about the the development market.

So if you're interested in the topic I think it would be worth listening. And don't worry, Carey will be the star of the show -- this time I'm just the vendor shill.

Yesterday I rashly predicted it would take me about 28-ish hours to get home from Bangalore, but now I find myself writing this from a hotel in London. It seems the relatively good luck I've had in my traveling all came to an end on this trip and over the week I've had to deal with (1) my luggage not arriving with me in Bangalore, (2) my Chennai-Bengalore flight being delayed by four hours, (3) a two-hour sit on the tarmac in Bangalore waiting for the fog to lift, leading to (4) missing my connecting flight in London. Reflecting on these minor setbacks over my bland English breakfast (I miss those idli with sambar already!) I decided there was a lesson in here on one of my favorite development/process topics, which is feedback.

It is 3:55 AM and I need to head to the airport in about 30 minutes but before my lovely 28-ish hour journey back home I wanted to jot down a repeating theme from the STeP-In Conference that just concluded here in Bangalore...

I'm in London right now, on my way to Bangalore where I'll be speaking at the STeP-IN Summit 2007 on Improving Quality Assurance through Developer Testing.

On the strong recommendation of Eddie Correia (editor of ST&P) I picked up Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat. That makes it his fault that I didn't sleep on my SFO-LHR flight! I'm not sure everyone would find is as compelling as I did, but for me it could almost be a companion book to my professional memoirs, or at least my memories.

I remember a long conversation the day Roger showed me NCSA Mosaic for the first time. It was the first time I heard the word Netscape (Flattener #2), and then we talked for hours about how the web was going to change everything! A few years later Jayson convinced me that there were some really big ideas there in Open Source (Flattener #4) and we started OpenAvenue, where we hoped to create a collaborative platform for Outsourcing (Flattener #5) and Offshoring (Flattener #6).

And as a parent who has watched the world change I've often felt The Quiet Crisis and wondered if I'm doing the right thing to prepare my children for the future. It is a question that I return to again and again. I'm living in the flat world and I know how to navigate it for myself. But as I hang up from calling my family via Skype on my way to "Asia Pacific's Largest Testing Conference" I don't know what to think about their future.

We get a lot of sample code that exhibits incorrect or unexplained behavior with AgitarOne - and many times we have to set it up in a debugger or import that code into an existing project. Recently I discovered that eclipse has a very easy technique for just this use case - thought I'll share it here.