Web Application Development Tips, Tricks and Techniques
Unit testing
Aug 3rd
A unit test is a piece of code written with the sole intention of verifying that a routine or function behaves as we’re expecting it to. Unit testing attempts to provide a collection of tests to check every method of the different classes the developed program may contain works flawlessly. The general idea is that, if all the parts of the program work properly independently, it’s highly likely that the program as a whole will function as expected. Of course, after all the unit tests are passed, integration tests must be performed as well to ensure the complete system doesn’t have any unintended behavior.
Improving software quality: automatic testing
Jul 13th
Providing high quality software from early stages in the software project is the key to a successful project. We must check the quality of our software in every single release and make sure it’s meeting our expectations. It’s much easier to code having quality requirements in mind from the very beginning than finishing a module and then fixing all the unexpected behavior afterwards.
There are many tools to improve the quality of our work. Developers have refactoring tools, memory profilers, code coverage, etc. But in a software project we also have testing resources, also known as Quality Assurance. Their job is to test the application and find as many bugs as possible: to achieve a high quality product, thorough testing is a very important step. However, this can be a very tedious and time-consuming task. Fortunately, part of this work can be performed automatically using some tools.
Software design patterns (IV): behavioral patterns
Jan 12th
We’ve already been through a brief introduction to design patterns, and a description of the most important creational design patterns and structural design patterns. In this article we’ll take a look at the last category of design patterns: behavioral patterns.
Behavioral design patterns are concerned with the relationships among communications using different objects. They identify common communication patterns and provide a well-known solution to implement this communication, offering a higher degree of flexibility.
The most used behavioral patterns are:
Software design patterns (III): structural patterns
Jan 5th
We already saw what design patterns are and took a look at creational patterns in earlier articles. Today we’ll deal with the second category: structural patterns.
These design patterns are all about class and object composition. Class-creation patterns use inheritance to compose interfaces, whilst object patterns define ways to compose objects to obtain new functionality. All of these patterns aim to ease the design by identifying a simple way to realize relationships between entities.
The most common structural patterns are:
Software design patterns (II): creational patterns
Dec 15th
In an earlier article we saw what design patterns are and how they can help us. Today we’re going to take a look at the first category: creational patterns.
Creational design patterns deal with class creation and instantiation, and how to use those instances. Basic class creation could result in design problems or added complexity to the design. These patterns solve these problems by controlling this object creation.
Some examples of creational design patterns:
Software design patterns (I)
Dec 8th
Design patterns are solutions to common software development problems, and aim to facilitate the development of a software project. A solution must have proven effectiveness and be highly reusable (can be applied to different design problems in different circumstances) to become a design pattern.
A pattern describes a problem that happens over and over again in our environment, and then explains the core of the solution to that particular problem. Since it is just a scheme of the solution, the application of this pattern is not literal: it requires adaptation. You could use the same pattern a thousand times, and never repeat the way you applied it.
My name is Oliver Mezquita Prieto, and I'm a Software Engineer focused on web application development, both serverside and clientside, using ASP.NET technology.
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