Under the hood and working with .Net, TDD, Software Design, and Agile Stuff
Occam's Razor
Let's all remember to check out the simplest, easiest to check causes first anytime we're debugging a testing or production defect. If nothing else, knock the simple explanations off the list of possibles quickly before you consider anything more complex. We had a case today where a data validation message in the test environment was wrong, but the FitNesse test in our build environment was correct. Simplest explanation? The deployment to testing wasn't correct. Actual explanation? The deployment to testing was incorrect. That should have been the very first thing to check, but it wasn't.
We had a manual post-step in a build process that was missed. That'll be automated by the end of day tomorrow to stop that problem in its tracks. Grrr.
About Jeremy D. Miller
Jeremy began his IT career writing "Shadow IT" applications to automate his engineering documentation, then wandered into software development because it looked like more fun. Jeremy previously worked as a systems architect building mission critical supply chain software for a Fortune 100 company and learned agile development practices as a .Net consultant at ThoughtWorks, one of the pioneers of agile development. Jeremy is the author of the open source StructureMap (http://structuremap.sourceforge.net) tool for Dependency Injection with .Net and the forthcoming StoryTeller (http://storyteller.tigris.org) tool for supercharged FIT testing in .Net. Jeremy's thoughts on just about everything software related can be found on his weblog "The Shade Tree Developer" at http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller, part of the popular CodeBetter site. Jeremy is a Microsoft MVP for C#.
