Testing & Debugging
A good developer knows how to test and debug!
Steve Krug's "Common Sense Approach to Web Usability" provides surprising and sometimes counterintuitive principles that every good website must follow. Krug preaches the importance of removing clutter in order to make the purpose and functionality of a site (or page) clear--and happily, he practices what he preaches in this remarkably lucid book. Here are some of Krug's key insights...
Have you ever had difficulty translating a set of requirements into a set of tests? Do you find regression testing to be a major bottleneck whenever you implement changes in your system? (Or do you have quality issues because you forgo regression testing?) Does your development team ever dump complex functionality into a "smart UI" that becomes difficult to maintain and extend? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you should check out FIT (the Framework for Integrated Testing).
Recently I discovered a tool that I had needed for a long time. Fiddler, a freeware product created and supported by Microsoftie Eric Lawson, can be used to debug HTTP traffic from any web browser (or client application). Here's how you can use it:
1. View/Analyze HTTP traffic....
2. Generate test scripts....
The moral of this tale is simple: in test-driven design, you have to fail before you can succeed.
The idea behind test-driven design (TDD) is to incorporate testing into the process of constructing your system, rather than waiting for developers to check in their code and to build a system that someone else tests. TDD has some advantages worth considering...