Often in your programming career, you will inadvertently write flawed code that introduces some fault into your codebase. These faults are called bugs and the activity of fixing bugs is called “debugging.” Of course, as developers, we try to write correct code every time, but writing bugs is simply a fact of life for programmers. The ability to diagnose and fix bugs is the mark of an experienced and talented developer and is foundational for advanced troubleshooting. In this article, we’ll go over some techniques for effective debugging and introduce you to PDB, the Python debugger. At the end of this article, you’ll be ready to not only troubleshoot and fix your own code, but to diagnose and debug existing code as well.
(more…)Category: Testing
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Test-Driven Development with Python: a Primer
Making sure the software we build works the way we (and our customers) want it to work is called, unsurprisingly, software testing. Software testing is an enormous topic; indeed, there are entire books, courses, conferences, academic journals, and more about the topic. One can even make a career out of testing software. We couldn’t possibly scratch the surface of the complexity involved in software testing in this article, so we’ll only focus on a topic most relevant to us as programmers: test-driven development.
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Improving Browser Automation Tests: How to Add Microsoft Edge and Edgedriver to Linux CI Systems
Lately, the Microsoft Edge browser has been growing in popularity, recently unseating Firefox as the 3rd most popular web browser and approaching Safari in the number two spot. This means that any web application with a potentially wide user base should include MS Edge tests in its automated test suite. Setting this up to run automatically, particularly in *nix based CI servers, can be quite a hassle when compared to setting up Chrome and Firefox browser tests. In this article, I’ll show you the steps to get the Edge browser and web driver running in a Linux-like CI system.
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Example TDD Workflows
This article isn’t designed to sell you on the benefits of TDD, it is simply a tutorial (in Java and JUnit) to get you acclimated to the typical workflow. TDD can be counter-intuitive, so we’ll go slow and keep it simple.
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Getting Started With Browser Automation Testing in Python
Developers have unit tests to test atomic functionality and integration tests to test system interoperability. Web developers have to take it a step further and test actual browser behavior. This can be done in many ways, but most often it’s with some implementation of Selenium webdriver and an xUnit testing framework. In this article, I’m going to show you how to write a basic framework in Python to get your tests able to interact with a browser.
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