Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Automated Regression Testing

Per the modern definition of "legacy code", my new projects (which I've had for six months) are legacy. No automated regression. No continuous integration. No unit tests. It should be left unsaid that the next time someone says, "We want you to take this project and own it," my response will be, if it doesn't have a.), b.) and c.), you will provide me a budget for software and the necessary resources of at least a certain level based on the age of the project and the scope of the code to implement those things, or I'm not interested. Live and learn. I spent part of tonight playing around with Watin, Selenium, iMacros, and TestComplete. Most of those don't actually target desktop applications, which is what I'm after, but it's interesting to fool around with the tools and see what I can accomplish. I had someone else ask me about the possibility of pulling a mailing list from the web, and using a testing tool that can be extended to write to a file using javascript or C# (actually any language, but those are my sweet spots) works perfectly in that case.

Not very managerial, but then neither is automating the scripts for open source analysis, analyzing code for security holes, or config-developing the tools necessary to poc the new open source jars.

What is managerial is that the developer I've been trying to promote for several months got his promotion to Lead Software Engineer today.  He's been a lead for other LSE's (2-3 depending on the time frame) for the last 12 months, so it was way overdue.  Proof that working for a big company with some golden handcuffs can still pay dividends depending on your goals if you step up when no one else will.  He earned the promotion and I'm excited to see him landing not only the change in title, but a raise, and a potential award (with cash) in the near future.

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