Documentation Coverage Testing With dcov
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How often have you thrown up your hands in disgust at the poor quality of documentation for an open source project?  Wouldn&#8217;t it be nice if someone put together a documentation coverage tool that worked like test coverage too ls?  Well, you&#8217;re in luck&#8212;dcov is here (at least for Ruby code).
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With test-driven development being promoted as one thing that can help encourage better coding, most developers are looking into its use and how it can help. Paul Jones takes an opposite approach, though, and looks at how it could cause "ravioli code" in an application.   I know that test-first and test-driven development (TDD) are popular methodologies these days, but something about those processes has always met with a level of mental resistance from me. Even though it sounds good in theory, I have been intuitively wary of the "test-first" mentality for some reason. My own approach is closer "remember to code so you can test it later" and then "test-last" after the API is mostly stable.   He includes quotes from Slashdot comment quotes from AuMatar and dkf. Be sure to check out the comments on the post (17 of them at the time of this posting) for some opinions from others about test-driven development and how it can affect your code.   Blogs also mentioning this discussion:   PHP in Action another post from Paul on some of the responses
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The Zend Developer Zone has another new tutorial from Padraic Brady talking about testing your applications (i.e. unit tests). In this new article, he expands on his previous one and dives a bit deeper into the behaviour-driven development process.   In this article, I introduce a TDD related practice called Behaviour-Driven Development which has been gathering attention for over a year and gaining converts (like me!).   He briefly covers what BDD is and how it can be used to solidify code against issues that might come up down the road (and how it compares to test-driven development). Some sample code/tests are included to give you a better idea of how it all fits together - a set of scenarios for any given "story". True to the title, Padraic writes his tests around the construction of a Klingon Bird of Prey ship.
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This paper will cover the challenge of identifying a reliable source of information to populate and maintain accurate configuration information from the distributed application and server environment for use in the CMDB.
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The tool is designed to inform users when their applications need patching.
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The purpose of this paper is to examine the difficulties of detecting complex viruses, including polymorphic, metamorphic and entry-point obscuring viruses. Whether or not an anti-virus (AV) technology can detect these viruses can be a useful metric to consider when evaluating AV products.
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Customers using Windows XP Embedded will be able to use a downloadable preview to test the new software for conflicts with existing drivers.
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Blog: Mapping software for modeling the path of infectious diseases made available as open-source.
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Travis Swicegood has made a new release of the successor to the PEAR RunTest package for PEAR2 - the new PHPT.    Since this is usable and PEAR2 is still being worked out, I've decided to release this as a standalone package for the time being with the intent of bundling it with Pyrus or including it directly in PEAR2 when PEAR2 is realized.   This provides the majority of the functionality provided by PEAR's pear run-tests command via its own phpt command and it can even provide pear style output.    Examples of its use are included as well as the method to download this latest version (via a PEAR channel, of course) or through the package's web page. Issues found with the software can be posted to the project's Google code page.
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The O'Reilly Network has a new article posted for all of those out there that are looking to make writing large documentation/publications much simpler.
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DrJava is a lightweight programming environment for Java designed to foster test-driven software development. It includes an intelligent program editor, an interactions pane for evaluating program text, a source level debugger, and a unit testing tool.   There appeared to have been a problem with the files that were uploaded for the 20080106-0744 stable version that prevented DrJava from being run when downloaded from some servers.  These problems had been fixed within two days of the release. The version number has not been changed since the files were simply uploaded again.  We apologize for the inconvenience.
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On the Dotvoid.com blog today, there's a new post that shares some handy code to parse out information from the incoming user agent string for the visitors for your site.   Recently I experimented a bit with an Apache log file analyzer written in PHP. It's not all that difficult were it not for trying to parse the browser, or user agent, string. [...] For my purposes I don't care much for the operating system details. This is the result so far. I'm still not very satisfied but I thought maybe other people might be interested and maybe help out.   He provides the code in the format of an encapsulated PHP function that returns the product they're using, the version number of the browser and other various comments.
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Infragistics is partnering with Mercury Interactive to offer a collection of custom libraries that enables automated testing of the presentation layer of Microsoft's .Net. The TestAdvantage development tool, built using Mercury Interactive QuickTest Professional, enhances presentation layer regression testing by giving development teams an automated way to test user interfaces created with Infragistics NetAdvantage. Infragistics will ship the release candidate of TestAdvantage in January of 2005 for an introductory price of $2,995.Â
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Sebastian Bergmann has posted the results of some benchmarking on the compilation he's done on the branches of PHP from version 3.0 all the way up to 5.3-CVS.   As people keep asking me for an update to my previous benchmarks (PHP / GCC / ICC Benchmark, PHP 5.1 / GCC Benchmark (Update), and PHP 5.1 Performance, I quickly ran a new benchmark today.   He rendered the results out into a series of charts defining the number of total seconds taken for the compile and how long each of the components took. It's impressive to see how much of a jump there was between the 3.0 series and 4.3.   He also includes his compile settings (and machine information) as well as the numbers for the results if you'd like to graph them out yourself.
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BO test bit whiffy Security firm Comodo, best known for its digital certificate business, has released a free diagnostic tool designed to identify buffer overflows in desktop security products. Our try-out, however, suggests that Comodo's BO Tester is principally designed to help poach users than provide a detailed breakdown of bugs.â¦
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Close on the heels of the SimpleTest 1.0RC1 release, is a new article titled "Coding a Login Box Shouldn't Hurt". Web sites can be fiddly to test, especially when it includes functionality like cookie handling and form filling. While manual testing is error prone and tedious, using a Web testing tool can automate the process, making development fast, accurate, and even fun. In this new article , Marcus Baker, helps you solve this tricky problem of authenticating users, by using test driven development.
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(Source: HP)  This paper offers a structured approach to planning and implementing HP Quality Center software, an integrated, web-based suite of tools and best practices for automated software quality testing.