Hiccupps

Some friends of mine are talking about starting to blog. They know why they want to blog, they have topics to blog about, and they are thoughtful, experienced, and eloquent enough that I have no doubt their writings would be worth reading. However. However they have been talking about starting for a reeeeaaaalllly loooooooong time.  Now, for sure, talking is good. Externalising ideas and goals to people you trust can provide a reality check, be a source of encouragement and refinement, and perhaps even feel like a commitment and motivation to start. But. But talking isn't actually starting . Now, for sure, they have reasons for not actually starting. Can't decide which platform to use, can't decide whether it should be testing or more general, need to think of a name, ... Nevertheless. Nevertheless those are displacement activities. They are completely valid, and even important, to consider but not needed in order to draft a first post. Perhaps you are prevaricating about b...

A couple of months ago, in Can You Hack It? , I wrote about how I increased the testability of a service by changing it in a way that allowed me to simulate the behaviour of one of its dependencies. With that in place I could force specific code paths to be followed and so explore different scenarios easily. That was sufficient for a quick and dirty experiment but, because I was changing code, each round was slower than I'd have liked as I had to edit, compile, run, and then test. --00-- When the next opportunity to work in that area came up, on a different service, I looked for an improvement to my test approach. I realised that I could remove the compile-run step by having some configuration that would specify the response from the external service. So I taught our product to look for the URL of a downstream service in an environment variable every time it wanted to call it. This gave me very precise control of the outgoing requests which I pointed at a local mock server called ...