Some of you may have noticed that
Scott Guthrie, a Product Unit Manager on Microsoft's Web Platform and Tools Team (read: ASP.NET), has returned from his blogging hiatus. In just one short week he’s posted a handful of incredible articles. I just got done reading his latest post,
Testing ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Web Developer which got me thinking about large scale software testing, and its relationship to Test Driven Development.
With a large project like ASP.NET, testing is no easy task. Take some time to read Scotts article if you haven’t already, as you’ll become privy to procedures that many of us have never even needed to think about. For example, there are over
105,000 test cases. Just this fact alone causes some problems in my “agile development” mind. First, I’m used to running most, if not all, of my unit tests
before I check in code. This way I can verify that I’m not checking in code that breaks functionality (assuming there are no bugs in the tests). However, I’m also used to having a few hundred to a couple thousand tests to run; a reasonable size for requiring a successful test run prior to a code check in. With 105,000 test cases, or even a small subset of that, it is not reasonable to expect developers to run through these tests. As Scott reveals, because of the complexity of these tests even a large subset is only run a few times a week, while the entire suite is run only twice a month.
So how does Test Driven Development fit into large scale projects like this? How could TDD or other agile methodologies affect projects like ASP.NET? There’s no doubt that ASP.NET is a rock solid product; it obviously doesn’t suffer from the quality issues unlike many other software products. Does TDD lose its practicality as the project grows? Does anyone have experience with a large scale agile project?
eWeek has an awesome success story on major recording firm EMI's use of SOA. EMI utlized Avanade's ACA.NET for their SOA implementation. It's nice to see SOA being more than just a buzzword. It's also nice to see the company I work for make such an awesome contribution to the fast growing SOA space.
If you happen to be in the Olympia WA area tonight, I'll be giving a presentation on Enterprise Library at the
South Sound .NET User Group.
If you're interested in refactoring, patterns, and generics, Avanade's Steve Maine has a three part blog post that is a must read as well as the accompanied discussions.
Awesome stuff. Someday I'll be able to critique work from the likes of Steve :-). Until then, I promise to start blogging more about the patterns & practices Enterprise Library.