ENTRIES TAGGED "testing"

Four short links: 10 December 2012

Four short links: 10 December 2012

Regular Expressions, Mobile Diversions, UX Pitfalls, and DIY Keyboarding

  1. RE2: A Principled Approach to Regular Expressions — a regular expression engine without backtracking, so without the potential for exponential pathological runtimes.
  2. Mobile is Entertainment (Luke Wroblewski) — 79% of mobile app time is spent on fun, even as desktop web use is declining.
  3. Five UX Research Pitfalls (Elaine Wherry) — I live this every day: Sometimes someone will propose an idea that doesn’t seem to make sense. While your initial reaction may be to be defensive or to point out the flaws in the proposed A/B study, you should consider that your buddy is responding to something outside your view and that you don’t have all of the data.
  4. Building a Keyboard: Part 1 (Jesse Vincent) — and Part 2 and general musings on the topic of keyboards. Jesse built his own. Yeah, he’s that badass.
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Tools for test-driven development in Scala

Two core Scala libraries support features for mocking and data generation.

Scala, a language designed for well-structured and readable programs, is richly provisioned with testing frameworks. The community has adopted test-driven development (TDD) and behavior-driven development (BDD) with zeal. These represent the baseline for trustworthy code development today. TDD and BDD expand beyond the traditional model of incorporating a test phase into the development process. Most programmers know that ad hoc…
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The many sides to shipping a great software project

An interview with Shipping Greatness author Chris Vander Mey.

Chris Vander Mey, CEO of Scaled Recognition, and author of a new O’Reilly book, Shipping Greatness, lays out in this video some of the deep lessons he learned during his years working on some very high-impact and high-priority projects at Google and Amazon. Chris takes a very expansive view of project management, stressing the crucial decisions and attitudes that…
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Data Jujitsu: The art of turning data into product

Data Jujitsu: The art of turning data into product

Smart data scientists can make big problems small.

Having worked in academia, government and industry, I’ve had a unique opportunity to build products in each sector. Much of this product development has been around building data products. Just as methods for general product development have steadily improved, so have the ideas for developing data products. Thanks to large investments in the general area of…
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In defense of frivolities and open-ended experiments

Our children will improve upon the things we're building in ways we can't conceive.

Before you scoff at the pointlessness of yet another social network, web app, or project, remember that we don't always do the research or build the company that is immediately useful or profitable.

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Jason Huggins' Angry Birds-playing Selenium robot

Jason Huggins' Angry Birds-playing Selenium robot

How a game-playing robot could help shape the future of mobile testing.

If you try to talk to Jason Huggins about Selenium, he'll probably do to you what he did to us. He'll bring his Arduino-based Angry Birds-playing testing robot to your interview and then he'll relate his invention to the larger problems of mobile application testing and cloud-based testing infrastructure.

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Don't put all your trust in mobile emulators

Don't put all your trust in mobile emulators

Steve Souders on how he reduces the development risks of mobile emulators.

Steve Souders, performance evangelist at Google, looks forward to the remote capabilities of debugging and testing, but he warns against putting too much faith in emulators.

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How Netflix handles all those devices

How Netflix handles all those devices

Netflix's Matt McCarthy on building apps that work across platforms.

Matt McCarthy explains how WebKit and A/B testing play important roles on Netflix's many apps. Plus: Platform lessons Netflix has learned that apply to other developers and companies.

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Process kills developer passion

Process kills developer passion

Best practices sound good in isolation, but they can suck the life out of developers.

The software industry is now full of "best practices," and many of them make sense when considered in isolation. But when you lump them all on the backs of developers, you end up with dispirited bureaucrats/bean counters.

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Four short links: 10 January 2011

Four short links: 10 January 2011

Online Collaboration, Reputable Twitterers, Old Computers, and Web Experiments

  1. Tools and Practices for Working Virtually — a detailed explanation of how the RedMonk team works virtually.
  2. Twitter Accounts for All Stack Overflow Users by Reputation (Brian Bondy) — superawesome list of clueful people.
  3. The Wonderful World of Early Computing — from bones to the ENIAC, some surprising and interesting historical computation devices. (via John D. Cook)
  4. Overlapping Experiment Infrastructure (PDF) — they can’t run just one test at a time, so they have infrastructure to comprehensively test all features against all features and in real time pull out statistical conclusions from the resulting data. (via Greg Linden)
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