Dan Card

For a recent project, I was trying to force myself to create unit and integration testing as part of the scaffolding. I had gotten to the point where my basic tests were moving along well and I was moving up the diagram from unit tests to integration tests. The basic project makeup is here: In working on the second tier cfcs (the image renderer, document render and the mesage renderer) I found myself starting to repeat some of the same tests again and again. The reason for this was pretty straightforward. All three of the renderers needed to return a struct with the same keys to the Decision Maker* so all three had a set of the same tests applied to them. This got tedious both to type out and the maintain as the needs of the structures morphed over time. Basically, the output from those and other other renderers that we'd develop in the future, needed to comply to an interface. All of them needed to have the same keys in the struct but the values would change based on the typ...

Over the past several months, I've been trying to work more habits into my workflow that make the coding product I'm creating better, more solid and done with a higher degree of confidence and less back and forth between myself and QA. One way that I've been trying to do that is by implementing some Unit and Integration Tests into my work flow rather than just simply "code and reload" and see if it worked. The idea is that we can run pieces of our code in place to see if the individual functions in our CFCs are working as expected and going from the bottom up to see if the entire process is working as we expect. Last fall at CFUnited, I took a training course with Ortus Solutions and discovered CommandBox and Testbox which have changed the way that I approach projects.  There are a number of ways to set this up but here is what seems to be working for me Prepping the environment Open up CommandBox and navigate to the root of your site. CommandBox isn't...

I don't know about you but as soon as i get involved in a project I think I tend to treat people as if they are co-creators with me. This is great to a point until you start talking to people on the subway about your db design and eliciting their thoughts. Usually around then (or before this), they leave. I don't get invited to parties much. I love collaboration and teams. I'm a natural extrovert and need people to bounce ideas off and refine thoughts until I want them to go away and leave me alone to build what we just talked about. I really values the random access to colleagues (to a point) that comes from working in a team environment, especially after working for so many years as a "one person shop" However, last summer it was really hit home to me that you need to know who are your collaborators, who is your client, with whom you can co-develop with and who needs to be presented with a completed or almost completed product. In short, really assess to who...