tfl: The Flatiron Life

Today I continued writing unit tests for the Excel Upload tool. I want to go more into depth later about what writing tests means, but for now the basic idea is I am writing code that tests application code. Today I started looking that the test coverage. This is how much of my application code is being executed by my test code. We are using a tool called Cobertura to generate this information. It runs the tests and determines what lines of code have been executed. Cobertura takes this information and generates a web page with pretty colors and highlighting of code reporting the percentage of code executed by class and package.

You might think everyone would want 100% test coverage. That might be the ideal, however much of ones code might be simple getters and setters, a facade to more code, or a number of other things with minimal logic involved. Writing tests for these patterns can be very time consuming. It is good to know you have written these simpler things correctly, but you really want to test the code that does the processing and this might be only 20% of a class. If you write the tests for this processing logic well you should be able to flush out many of the problems with the simpler code.

Also today, I needed to tell my Project Manager what tasks I foresee with COLO Phase 3 and the LOEs (Level Of Effort) for these tasks. It is the nature of a project manager to be worried about when their project is going to be completed and mine is worried about the 2 weeks I am going to be taking off in 9 work days. The total for my LOEs was 9 days. That is cutting it close, but it is not critical I finish before marrying. The code complete date is at the beginning of November, and I will have a couple days to work on it. The PM is also worried about the Front End team being held up while I am gone. To alleviate this Anton, who has worked on Phses 1 and 2 with me) will be covering me if the Front End developers need any thing.