Better Software Magazine Articles

Developing Your Sense of Smell

With all of the resources available these days—books, blogs, Webcasts, training,—that aid us in our design, are you one of those programmers who lacks the "olfactory gene" needed to detect refactoring odors in your code? Unit testing helps you refine your sense of smell and improve your code design.
Tod Golding's picture Tod Golding
September 26, 2007
One Step Back ... Two Steps Forward

A change to code that previously was working may introduce new failures. Testing for regression can catch these failures, find new problems, and identify opportunities to improve your test design.
Michael Bolton's picture Michael Bolton
January 30, 2007
Tapping into Testing Nirvana

As the initial, positive vibes of unit testing begin to fade, Tod Golding goes in search of whatever it is that sends some developers into a seemingly ongoing state of unit-testing nirvana. Respect your unit tests, Grasshopper, and find your testing center.
Tod Golding's picture Tod Golding
September 5, 2006
Double Duty: Repurpose Unit Tests to Create System Documentation

System documentation is a pain to do and it's even harder to keep up to date. What if, by refining the unit tests you already are doing, you could create documentation automatically, and have it be automatically updated? Find out how one team is making it work for them.
Brian Button
April 4, 2005
Introducing Test-First Development

Testers are often frustrated to receive a product for testing that is riddled with bugs. They want to know why some of the bugs couldn't have been caught during development. If only some tests could be run before the code was handed off! Jason Bedunah learned the benefits of test-first development first hand. Here, he introduces a framework for testing and coding that he found to be very helpful, and he gives some pointers on getting developers on board with test-first development.
Jason L. Bedunah
July 11, 2002
Learning to Love Unit Testing

Unit testing can become a developer's best friend. Find out how and why from two programmers who now rely on this practice to improve development.
Andy Hunt Dave Thomas
June 26, 2002
The Two Bugs

Brian Marick applies the philosophical concept of "ready-to-hand" to software programming and describes two bugs that illustrate problems caused by mismatched reuse of ideas.
Brian Marick
June 26, 2002

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