I have been in the Information Technology field a long time. Maybe too long… close to 35 years.
I have been through the fads, the whims, the hype, and host of other trends that have come and gone with barely a whimper. Yet, the trend I am starting to see does not appear to be one that will go away but seemingly become worse over time.
Information Technology, a scientifically based discipline that requires a professional developer’s “creative juices” as much as it needs their penchant for logic seems to be running aground quite rapidly on all the hype that promotes this field as nothing more than a commodity to be used for the increasing irrational requirements of business people that have historically lived in alternate realities as to what is possible and what isn’t.
A case in point is the article below from gantthead.com, which details the experience of one technical manager trying to meet an irrational deadline promoted by a committee completely disassociated with the realities of their own requests.
There was a time that the very nature of Information Technology dictated such terms to its “masters’ but today, with technology changing at increasingly dizzying speeds, the concept of rational project planning has seemingly slipped off the radar. This event, though always a common factor in the field, has been encouraged ever more so by the commoditization of such technology to the extent that many technical managers themselves view the implementation of critical processes as nothing more than a simplistic act of writing some code and restricting testing to the thinnest of timelines.
Business talks a great line how they want professional technicians to come to the table with new ideas and enthusiasm but the reality still seems to be what they really want are “boiler room” people to keep shoveling coal into their aging furnaces.
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Pex: Automated Exploratory Testing for .NET
Go here to get everything you need…
Pex (Program EXploration) is an intelligent assistant to the programmer. From a parameterized unit test, it automatically produces a traditional unit test suite with high code coverage. In addition, it suggests to the programmer how to fix the bugs. Watch the screencast!
Pex generates Unit Tests from hand-written Parameterized Unit Tests through Automated Exploratory Testing based on Dynamic Symbolic Execution.
• Unit Tests: parameterless methods that test a single unit of code
• Parameterized Unit Tests: same as above, but with parameters
• Automated Exploratory Testing: A tool-supported process of running, learning and testing code at the same time
• Dynamic Symbolic Execution: A combination of static analysis and runtime monitoring to compute test inputs
Date: May 12th, 2008
Author: Tony Patton
While Internet Explorer is popular with users, Firefox is the best browser for Web developers. I continue to discover and take advantage of the myriad of add-ons available for Firefox. I recently discovered two tools — View formatted source and View Source Chart — for viewing and working with the source code for pages viewed within Firefox.
The need
One of the more frustrating aspects of Web development is debugging. The disconnected nature of a Web page makes it hard to always see what is happening within the browser. There are other add-ons for debugging and development tools like Visual Studio that provide a way to step through an application’s source code, but peeking inside the page is often necessary to get an idea of what is happening.
All browsers include a menu option that allows you to easily view the page source. That is, the markup (including JavaScript and CSS) that comprises the page and defines how it is presented and responds to user input. Figure A shows the Page Source option selected from the Firefox View menu for the TechRepublic home page.
Figure A
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