Samuel Taggart

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

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

Design Patterns , Unit Testing

Humble Objects

Ego is the Enemy. Ego can cause us all kinds of problems in our personal and professional lives. When it comes to software, it is no different. Objects and VIs that have large egos create problems. One of the problems they cause is that they make it very hard for

Unit Testing

Unit Testing As An Aid For API Development

If you follow Test Driven Development (TDD) the first step is always to write your unit tests before you write your code. Well in LabVIEW that doesn’t work out quite so well because you need to have a subvi to drop into your test case. That means that before

Unit Testing , Coding Philosophy

Unit Testing as Bug Repellant

Nobody likes bugs, whether they are mosquitoes, black flies, spiders, or software bugs. One mosquito bite is generally mildly annoying but tolerable. Similarly with software, if your customers find a bug, it usually results in mild annoyance. Of course, there are exceptions to both: some mosquito bites can be deadly

Unit Testing

Unit Testing as a Delegation Tool

Delegation is hard. There are a variety of reasons, but there are two things I’ve heard quite often from customers, and they are related. They have trouble specifying and clearly communicating the exact requirements to the person they are delegating to. They also have trouble verifying that whatever code

Conferences

See us at CLA Summit 2019

We just received word that our submission at NI Week was accepted. Unit Testing at Mock Speed We will be talking about using some new tools me have developed for creating Mock Objects in LabVIEW for Unit Testing. A mock object is a kind of test double. Just like a

Unit Testing

Unit Testing as Documentation

Comments and documentation often lie. The only truth is the code. Steve Watts commenting on Chris Stryker’s Clean Code presentation at NIWeek 2019 Now I don’t think Steve is accusing the developer who wrote the code or documentation of deliberately lying, but we’ve probably all encountered code

Unit Testing , Coding Philosophy

Unit Testing as a Safety Net

Since I recently finished reading xUnit Test Patterns and my upcoming webinar is on Unit Testing, I have been thinking a lot about it lately. I thought I would expand on some of the ways in which I find unit testing incredibly useful. Most of wouldn’t even think of

How to

Using Maps As A Better Way To Pass Command Line Arguments

So for those who don’t know, LabVIEW 2019 incorporates some new datatypes: Sets and maps. Piotr Kruczkowsk has been posting a bunch of possible use cases on Twitter. You can see them here. Peter has inspired me to come up with one of my own. The problem with CLI

Conferences

NI Week 2019 Recap

I had a great time at NI Week this year. As always it was a bit of a party, although this year I skipped the Spazmatics after party after party on Wednesday night since I had to present early on Thursday. The highlight was definitely hearing Scott Kelly speak on

Webinars

June 2019 Webinar

How do I make sure my code works? If you have ever asked that question then this presentation is for you. Find out how unit testing can help you verify that your code works and help you track down bugs when it doesn’t. We’ll talk about the basics

Book Reviews , Unit Testing

XUnit Test Patterns

If you want to know everything there is to know about xUnit Testing, then xUnit Test Patterns by Gerard Meszaros is the book for you. I must warn you, it is not light reading (it’s almost 900 pages) and it is not geared towards beginners. You should at least

Conferences

NI Week - Why all the hype?

Today is the first day of NI Week 2019. What is NI Week? It’s only the largest gathering of LabVIEW enthusiasts in the world! My friend John jokingly refers to it as something akin to a Star Trek Convention. Granted there is a bit of geekiness going on there,

Interviews

My Origins Story

I recently sat down for an interview with Ram Gurung. We talked a lot about how I got into LabVIEW and the ensuing adventures. I also give a brief overview of my upcoming presentation at NI Week. Ram has a lot of really great LabVIEW videos and tutorials on his