Samuel Taggart

The official "Architect of Adventure". I help teams create healthy, human-centered software development processes.

Coding Philosophy

Philosophy and Coding

“Is your value system producing the results you want?” My last post touched a little bit on philosophy. It talked about changing the way we think about unit testing. If you have watched my presentations on Refactoring or TDD, you’ll notice they also talk about changing the way we

Coding Philosophy , Unit Testing

Stop Asking Permission To Do The Right Thing

I was originally going to title this post “A Business Case for Unit Testing”. I was going to talk about how it helps you to find bugs early, spend less time debugging, and all the other benefits I have mentioned in my previous posts. I intended it as a cheat

Book Reviews

Age of Wonder

At GDevCon, Allen and I were talking about books we’d recently read and I was reminded about a book that I read last year called “Age of Wonder”. A friend had given it to me 5 years ago when I moved from Pittsburgh to Denver and it took a

How to , Software tools , Unit Testing

Caraya Review

Caraya is a popular Unit Testing solution from JKI. Compared to JKI VI Tester, Caraya seems to be newer and better supported. In fact while conducting this review I found a small bug. I reported it and it was fixed within 24 hours. The Caraya paradigm is different from the

Unit Testing , Webinars

December 2019 Webinar

Refactoring December 11 11:00am MT I need to add a feature but it is too hard. Refactoring can help! Refactoring is the art of taking existing code and waking it easier to understand and modify without actually changing it’s behavior. Why? Friction. Code is read more often than

How to , Software tools , Unit Testing

Insta Coverage

I first heard about InstaCoverage at NI Week 2018. I was part of a panel discussing Unit Testing. Peter Bokor gave a brief presentation right before the panel started on a new unit testing tool IncQuiry Labs had created called InstaCoverage. He really emphasized the code coverage calculation. This is

Conferences , Resources

GDevCon #2 Videos

The GDevCon #2 Videos are now available. You can access the entire playlist here. We are proud to have sponsored an event that produces such great content! All of the presentations were great and worth watching, but here are some of my favorites. * Rebar – Ben Leedom introduced a new programming

How to , Software tools , Unit Testing

AST Unit Tester Review

I recently did a review of JKI VI Tester. While it is my goto unit testing tool, there are several issues with it: * You have to be an admin to install it. * It adds a ton of dependencies to your project. * If you have a project that has tests in

How to , Software tools , Unit Testing

Using JKI VI Tester

If you have been following my posts, you will know that I am a big fan of JKI VITester. It is my goto Unit Tester. Why? Mostly because it is an implementation of xUnitStyle testing, which means that I can easily use all of the great patterns outlined in xUnit

Book Reviews

Guns Germs and Steel

Guns Germs and Steel is a very interesting and entertaining book. Similar to the last book I reviewed, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, Gun’s Germs and Steel challenges the reader’s view of the world. It starts with a very simple narrative that we are all familiar with and then

Unit Testing

Reusing Tests for Built Code

As I have been doing more and more Unit Testing and Continuous Integration, I have often wondered about automating testing of built code. There are promising tools out there for testing built Win32 apps, such as WinAppDriver. There is also Selenium for testing webapps, so if you are into the

Book Reviews

Outliers

I’ve had several very interesting conversations lately. I had a great conversation with Allen, Shane, Danielle, and Oli after GDevCon2. I had another fascinating conversation with Fab and few others after the CLA Summit. Most recently I had a conversation after Social Media Day Denver. All these conversations had

Unit Testing , OOP

Mock Objects Advanced Features

In the last post, I talked about how to use Mock Objects in Unit Tests. In this post, I am going to talk about some advanced features of the Mock Objects. It is worth going back and reading my previous posts on Mock Objects if you have not already done

Coding Philosophy

Be The Developer Everyone Wants On Their Team

I’ve been an avid rockclimber and mountaineer for over 15 years. I spend a lot of time helping out with the Colorado Mountain Club teaching classes. I was recently talking to one of the other instructors and he said something that stuck with me. He said there was a

Unit Testing , OOP

How To Use Mock Objects in Tests

In the last couple posts, I talked about Mock Objects: what they are and how to implement them in LabVIEW. In this post, I am going to talk about how to use them in unit tests. For reference, the video below shows how to use the Class Refactoring Toolkit and

Unit Testing , OOP

Anatomy of a Mock Object

In the last post, I talked about Mock Objects and what they are. In this post, I am going to talk a little bit about what they look like when you implement them in LabVIEW. The video below shows how to use the Class Refactoring Toolkit I created to create

Unit Testing , Webinars

October 2019 Webinar

Test Driven Development October 23 11:00am MT I Tried Unit Testing But Testing My Existing Code Is Too Hard! That’s because you have got the order wrong! Writing unit tests after the fact is possible, but it is always hard. Why? Because whoever wrote it never thought about

Unit Testing , OOP

Creating Mocks in LabVIEW

In my last article, I introduced the concept of Mock Objects. The obvious next question is how do you implement them in LabVIEW? Many other languages either have builtin or readily available third party mock objects frameworks. LabVIEW does not. Until Now. I’ve create some tools for class refactoring

Unit Testing , OOP

Mock Objects

At the upcoming CLA Summit, I will be giving a presentation on mock objects. I thought I would introduce them here first for those who aren’t familiar with them. If you read any literature on unit testing you are bound to run into them. A Different Kind of Test

Conferences

GDevCon2 Initial Thoughts

I finally got home and am starting to recover from GdevCon. Like many of these types of conferences, attending GDevCon is like drinking from a fire hose. Add to that attending the workshop that Steve, Fab, and Joerg put on, lots of late-night discussions at the bar and a little

Continuous Integration , Unit Testing

Continuous Integration and Unit Testing

If you saw my presentation at GDevCon 2, you’ll know that Test Driven Development is about more than just writing unit tests. It’s about the whole development process. However, after each development iteration, you do end up with a bunch of tests. Why not integrate them into your

Unit Testing

LightWeight Doubles with SQLite

In a previous article, I mentioned that one reason to use a Test Double was to increase performance. One place where this is evident is in database access. Doubles can be very useful for database operations for the following reasons: * Isolation from the production database – Isolate any changes you make

Design Patterns , Unit Testing , OOP

Test Doubles In Action

In the last post, I talked about Test Doubles and some various types that we can use and how to implement them. The next obvious question is how do we actually use them in our tests. Dependency Injection Understanding Test Doubles first requires understanding the concept of dependency injection. This

Design Patterns , Unit Testing

Intro to Test Doubles

It’s no secret that many Hollywood actors use stunt doubles. These are specialists that from the outside look and behave like the stars, but have unique talents. The actors do most of the heavy lifting in terms of acting, but for fight scenes, car chases, jumping off buildings, etc.

Continuous Integration , Webinars

August 2019 Webinar

Basic Continuous Integration with GitLab and LabVIEW – 8/28 at 11am MT How do I make sure my unit tests get run regularly? Maybe you have unit tests, vi analyzer tests, and a build process in place but how often do you actually run them? What if one action that