...but not having the code that they busted bite me in the ass after I return from the holidays is.
I'm not sure how I ever got along without a boatload of Tests. I can't believe that I used to write huge amounts of code and not test it until the very end.
Even today when I came in to find a bunch of broken test cases in our tree (I know, I know, I should use CruiseControl) I was able to fix them in a few minutes and get back to work. When I think about the amount of work it caused us a while ago when someone checked in an incorrect regular expression to some XML, didn't test it, and we didn't notice for a couple of months that it didn't work, it drives me crazy. We wasted a week on that crazy bug. Today I would waste about 2 minutes.
I guess that my Christmas present to myself is that the code that broke all of those test cases today isn't going to sit around until after New Years and manifest itself at some later date when we've all forgotten about it. It's good to know that year I won't be returning to work with any development lumps of coal in my stocking.

I have been working for a few days now on functional testing our webapps, and I must say that the selection and quality of tools out there right now is rather poor. My initial choice was Cactus, but it is no good for functional testing because it loses the session between test cases. This appears to be by design because apparently there's no way to guarantee the order that the Cactus test cases execute in. It's really a shame too, because I really like the way that Cactus works and how closely integrated with Maven it is. Maybe I'll have to bother the Cactus developers about implementing an easy way to carry the session from test to test, and then I'll figure out some way to run them in the correct order.

Moving on, I checked out Canoo WebTest and HttpUnit, but HttpUnit kept giving me linker errors when I tried to run my test suite and WebTest seemed a bit verbose. Neither of them appealed to my lazy side enough.

Finally, I settled on Latka, at the suggestion of dIon Gillard. dIon wrote a Maven plug-in that can take in JMeter proxy output and turn it into a basic Latka test case. That way I can test my applications by hand through my browser and have the actions that I performed saved and repeated by Latka later. Just add in some verification to the generated Latka test cases and you're good to go. It's definately still kind of messy, but with a little bit of work I think that we could have something great here.

Thanks to the Werken company and their wonderful .css I now have a decent looking Blog up and running.
Random grumbling about things is sure to follow soon.

I decided to set up a blog so that I can be as cool as Bob McWhirter.
Now to go steal his .css stuff.