Testing your assumptions

If I were to list some of the most dangerous habits observed in the way programmers work, I would definitely put making assumptions on this list. Let me explain. Recently, I have been debugging this one unit test that was showing signs of being a false positive. Turns out I was right about that and the reason was really simple – someone made an assumption that turned out to be false.  Let’s face it – we have all been there at least once in our career (even once sounds too good to be true 🙂 ). We assumed that certain situation, outcome or combination of several factors is simply not going to occur only to receive a bug report confirming that this assumption was wrong. This often unconscious practice is really common and causes trouble all over the world.

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Master your IDE logging with Grep console

One of many daily activities that every programmer needs to do in order to do their work is to control logging output from their application. Logging, when done properly and correctly, provides great insight into the inner workings of the application and may be a great resource for analyzing and optimizing your codes behavior. Whether it is during development or maintenance/support phase of the product life-cycle, this task is often considered to be unpleasant for many programmers. But since log analysis is so important and often required there usually isn’t simple way around. In this article I will present an elegant solution to reviewing logs in development stage of the application within IDE.

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