Articles

by Bill Venners, March 31, 2003 Submit comment
Pragmatic Programmers Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas talk with Bill Venners about reversible design decisions, the cost of change curve, going beyond the requirements, and making systems configurable.
by Bill Venners, March 24, 2003 6 messages
Pragmatic Programmers Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas talk with Bill Venners about an approach to design in which details are pulled out of the code and stored as metadata.
by Bill Venners, March 17, 2003 Submit comment
Pragmatic Programmers Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas talk with Bill Venners about the myth of bug-free software, the importance of specifying level of quality as a system requirement, and the need for every team member to inject quality throughout the development cycle.
by Frank Sommers, March 17, 2003 12 messages
SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) has become synonymous with XML- based Web services. However, many real-world response-request-type Web services don't use SOAP; instead, they pass XML messages directly over HTTP. This article discusses these two Web service design approaches.
by Bill Venners, March 10, 2003 2 messages
Pragmatic Programmers Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas talk with Bill Venners about maintenance programming, the DRY principle, code generators and orthogonal systems, and a story about one highly coupled control system: the helicopter.
by Bill Venners, March 10, 2003 Submit comment
This tutorial shows you how to customize a Suite subclass so that it executes tests by interpreting a script written in a custom test language.
by Bill Venners, March 3, 2003 19 messages
This short article suggests that not only can systems and scripting languages co-exist in the enterprise, they can co-exist to great advantage in individual developers as well.
by Bill Venners, March 3, 2003 9 messages
Pragmatic Programmers Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas talk with Bill Venners about software craftsmanship and the importance of fixing the small problems in your code, the "broken windows," so they don't grow into large problems.
by Bill Venners, February 24, 2003 42 messages
Recognizing good programmers among job applicants is not easy. This article contains interview techniques, garnered from a recent summit on writing better code, that can help you can find the most qualified programmers for your project.
by Bill Venners, February 24, 2003 Submit comment
In this tutorial, Bill Venners shows you how to create a custom reporter for Artima SuiteRunner that formats unit test results in XML.
by Bill Venners, February 17, 2003 Submit comment
This article describes how to use Artima SuiteRunner as a JUnit runner to run your existing JUnit test suites.
by Bill Venners with Frank Sommers, February 17, 2003 Submit comment
Python creator Guido van Rossum talks with Bill Venners about the importance of "pythonic" API design, the usefulness of intuiting performance, the value of experience and community feedback in design decisions, and the process of deciding how to evolve Python's standard library.
by Bill Venners, February 10, 2003 Submit comment
Conformance tests are an important aspect of publicly specified APIs. Unit tests are an effective way to improve software robustness. In this tutorial, Bill Venners shows you how to use Artima SuiteRunner to help you build conformance and unit tests for Java-based projects.
by Bill Venners with Frank Sommers, February 10, 2003 23 messages
Python creator Guido van Rossum talks with Bill Venners about the robustness of systems built with strongly and weakly typed languages, the value of testing, and whether he'd fly on an all-Python plane.
by Bill Venners, February 3, 2003 3 messages
Python creator Guido van Rossum talks with Bill Venners about the nature of contracts in a runtime typed programming language such as Python.