www.BenStopford.com

Beyond Stubs: Why We Need Interaction Testing

admin — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 21:50:13 +0000

Consider the moment when the barber holds up the mirror so you can examine the cut of your newly trimmed neckline. Have you ever been slightly surprised by the realisation that, firstly, the back of your head actually exists and, secondly, how unfamiliar you are with what it looks like? Interaction testing (Mocking) is strangely [...]

Isolating Functional Units: Why We Need Stubs

admin — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 19:21:46 +0000

I’m planning a short set of articles on testing, summarising my thoughts from the slides presented at RefTest (here). This first one looks at the traditional split between unit tests, in which tests are genearlly isolated, and functional tests, which exercise an entire call stack. If an application is built without the use of stubs [...]

Are Mocks All They Are Cracked Up To Be?

ben — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 09:41:40 +0000

I noticed the below snippet in Martin Fowler in his article on the subject of Mock based testing: “I don't see any compelling benefits for mockist TDD, and am concerned about the consequences of coupling tests to implementation.”

Coherence: The Fallacy of Linear Scalability

ben — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 15:33:07 +0000

There is substance to the claims of Coherence's scalability but these only really apply to the more basic features of the product. This article looks at why...

Disruptive Technologies in the Data Layer

ben — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 14:35:20 +0000

This article discusses the data layer has changed through the introduction of Distributed Caching, Clustering, Shared Nothing Architectures and Column orientation.

Shared Nothing v.s. Shared Disk Architectures: An Independent View

ben — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:33:17 +0000

This article looks at the Shared Nothing Architecture when compared with its main competitor: Shared Disk.

Are You an HPC Architect?

ben — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:12:34 +0000

Some interview fodder – or maybe you just fancy testing your brain?? These scenarios are open ended and can be answered to different levels in different ways. The key point is to have a think about fundamental issues that affect performance and scalability in each scenario. Then try and fit the technologies to them. Scenario 1 : System [...]

Performing Efficient Cross-Cache Joins in Coherence

ben — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:49:36 +0000

You need to return a data set made from related items in different distributed caches. You need to do a join. So how do you do it efficiently in Coherence? In practice there are two types of join that are worth considering. The first is the simple case, where you have to separate entities that need [...]

How do I calculate how much data I can store in a Coherence cluster?

ben — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:21:10 +0000

Some help with the maths...

How Fault Tolerant Is Coherence Really?

ben — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:31:09 +0000

The fault tollerance of Coherence is often badly understood. This article explitly defines the fault tollerance guarentees that Coherence provides and explains where they come from.