Summa

There is a lot of talk these days about 100% test coverage and if we should strive to reach it. I honestly think that 100% test coverage is a hot topic because it can be easily measured.

To me the most important question is how much test coverage is enough.

I would like to discuss test coverage by making an analogy with exercise.
We all know that exercising, like testing, is a good thing. We also know that there is a range that dictates the minimum and maximum amount of exercise that will be beneficial. Too little exercise and nothing happens, too much and it can hurt and even cause permanent damage.
How much exercise is enough? Will I be healthy if I start running some miles every week? Probably yes. Would I be even healthier if I (try) to run 1000 miles every week? Most likely not.

It is the same thing with testing. Can I definitely say that a product with 60% test coverage is “healthier” than a product with 1%? Not definitely, but plausibly yes, to the point that I can bet on it, and I’m not a gambler. How about a product with 40% and one with 50% test coverage? From a “healthy” perspective it is hard to assume that one is better than the other by looking only at the coverage. (A theme for another post would be to discuss if High Test Coverage is a cause or consequence of the fitness of a product).

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In the early days of SOA many new products arrived on the scene that seemed to be solutions looking for a problem. As the SOA space matures (or maybe matured, since some have claimed it is dead*), so do the products and the relevant architectural patterns that use those products. However, there are other areas of SOA where you find solutions looking for a problem - the services themselves.

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Anyone who has had to work on a Swing project has probably found that when you Google for good Swing tips, frameworks, etc…you’ll most likely come up empty handed. Oh you’ll find basic examples of how to build some Swing components and that will be enough if you want to just build static forms that stay the same forever, but truly dynamic forms and interfaces can be frustrating to say the least.

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Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are increasingly being seen as successful models for creating lightweight front-ends for SOAs. They not only allow developers to overcome the static natured HTML’s limitation of refreshing the entire page to load new information but also allow flashy graphics, and immersive user experiences. Adobe’s Flex is a free open source framework for building and maintaining RIAs that allows consistent deployment on all major browsers. Adobe provides a commercially available development environment (Flex builder) with free trial version for 60 days that is highly recommended for ease of development.

Besides the rich interface library, Flex provides SOA based data access components that allows server side interaction for the flex applications. This article will look at the different ways for bringing server side data into a Flex application, primarily focusing on Remote Services using BlazeDS.

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When Voltaire wrote, “The perfect is the enemy of the good”, I strongly suspect that he did not have software design and development projects in mind. But he may well have in mind had one of problems that software development projects of often suffer: elegance creep. When is “good enough” actually better than perfect? What can architects, project managers and business stakeholders do to recognize and address elegance creep?

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