Category: Misc

Types of Test Data You Should Use for Your Software Tests

Testing is an integral and vital part of creating software. In fact, test code is as important as your production code. When you create test code, you need to generate test data for your code to work against. This post is about the different types of test data that are used in software testing. I’ll elaborate on each type and explain what test types are used in which scenarios. Types of Test Data Valid Data As the name implies, this is the data that your program expects and should operate on. You …

Cordova vs. React Native: A Detailed Analysis

Mobile apps have exploded in popularity over recent years. The introduction of the iPhone 3G in 2008 spawned a new industry overnight. App development is now an industry that generates more than $34 billion in revenue. To reach all potential users, developers need to develop applications for (at least) the two leading platforms: Android and iOS. Since the development for the platforms is time-consuming and requires different expertise (Swift/iOS vs. Java/Kotlin), cross-platform solutions were introduced over the years. Among them, Unity, Ionic, Cordova, and React Native. Those solutions ideally allow you to …

Column-Oriented Database Examples: A Helpful List

Column-oriented databases have seen a resurgence in interest in recent years. The first column-oriented databases appeared decades ago. However, they have never gained a lot of traction in the market. In recent years, though, big data and cloud computing spurred a new interest in these types of databases. The reason for this is that the unique implementation of columnar databases fits surprisingly well into the workloads and applications run in cloud computing. More on this below. In this post I’ll discuss the following: What are column-oriented databases? How do they differ from …

Tips for Optimizing Apps Running in Heroku

Heroku is a popular platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud that allows you to run your applications in a serverless manner. This post is about optimizing applications running in Heroku: making them run faster, giving them better security, and generally fine-tuning them. What Is Heroku? Heroku was the front-runner in the relatively new field of PaaS providers. It was among the first companies to offer a fully serverless solution. Heroku offered developers the ability to concentrate on writing their code rather than managing and tuning the running environment of their applications. Essentially, it removed the …

Using H2 as in memory database for unit/component tests instead of MySQL

h2 database

So following my recent post regarding the creation of a component test framework – let’s take a closer look in the use case of using H2 as a lightweight in memory database instead of MySQL, for your unit/component tests. Benefits of using H2 instead of MySQL It makes a lot of sense to use H2 in the context of component tests instead of MySQL: You can create and destroy a DB/table/data on the fly – once the tests are done the DB disappears. Compare this to having to rollback manually every change …

Creating a component test framework

component tests

If you have been reading Martin Fowler’s canonical article on the test pyramid, you know that there is a mystical layer that hides between those braod unit tests (the base of the pyramid) and the integration tests layer (near the top). This layer is called: component tests. This article is about the following : What are component tests? Why should you care, and how to implement them properly? What are component tests and why should you care? Basically component tests are the the part that theoretically should allow you to isolate a …