Graphsy Blog

To set the ground for this post I first need to reiterate a message that has been heard from many other sources.  Code coverage can only tell you how bad your test suite is, not how good it is.  Meaning that if you have bad coverage you know something is wrong, but a high coverage number tells you virtually nothing.  This message seems obvious for many developers out there, but it’s not heard by a surprisingly large section of them.

I have been a teaching assistant for several undergraduate and graduate testing classes.  Every year when I grade their unit testing projects I always get several of them (about a quarter) that hand in tests with “good” coverage, but not a single assert statement to check the results of their tests.  This is even after I get up in front of the class and rant about the exact problem from previous years. Needless to say those students tend to do poorly.

So, if test coverage is not a good metric, how can developers measure the quality of their test suites?  I’m going to talk about one approach in this post, mutation testing.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, day 2 is done and I have to say it was a bit of a disappointment when compared to the first day.  Unfortunately I believe that was in part due to my choice of sessions.  The best paper was in the session I did not attend and upon talking with the authors it sounds rather interesting.  There was one shining beacon, the day’s keynote.  The component session was not bad, but not great, while the experience reports were pretty much a disaster and did not really provide anything interesting.  Ohh well I guess, lets jump in and go over the highlights.

Read the rest of this entry »

The first day of the Automated Software Engineering (ASE) conference has passed.  I wanted to highlight a few things that I saw and thought were interesting.   Sorry for posting my impressions a bit late, but I guess it’s better late than never.  I’ll write a separate post for days two and three.

Read the rest of this entry »

TechCrunch50 is streaming all of the presentations this week.  I was able to catch most of them yesterday.  If you are not watching them, you really should, they are not only informational, but good examples of how to and not to present. Check them out here. I have found them very educational so far and got to see some really cool products. I wanted to share a few of my favorites from yesterday (this is in the order of appearance).

Read the rest of this entry »

Just downloaded the WordPress plugin for the iPhone. Figure I’ll give it a try on the train. So here is my quick review of the plugin.

The WordPress plugin allows you to save the post localy for later upload. You can also edit posts already online. Basically you get all of the expected functionality when it comes to text editing. You can also add images, from the library or take them with the camera. I’ve added a picture of the neo cube I took earlier this week.

All of this functionality is great, but still has its limitations. First typing a post on the iPhone is not a lot of fun. It’s workable for small pieces, but at this point I am already tired of making mistakes. Second I am a terrible speller, and while the iPhone fixes most of my mistakes I fixed a few others by hand, which makes me think there are lots more mistakes here. Finally the preview option seems to be slow, but that could be because my connection is going up and down. When it did finally work everything looked terrible.

Basically I’m saying that the app is good, but limited by the iPhone. I can see my self using this for small, quick posts about something interesting I found, but isn’t that what Twitter or FriendFeed is for?

Just wanted to give everyone lots of options to keep track of what’s happening with Graphsy. First you can subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog or Graphsy’s main news RSS.  If you have twitter you can follow me at www.twitter.com/xmerer.  Or if you prefer friendfeed, you can track me at www.friendfeed.com/trool.  Trool was already taken on twitter.  If people are interested in Graphsy only feeds on twitter and friendfeed let me know and I’ll set it up.  Also if there are other services that may be useful post them here.