Code is pretty, but testing is beautiful
A couple of years ago I did a Q&A with Q&A with Christopher Seiwald who is chief technology officer for Perforce Software. Seiwald made a comment that he thought code should be more than just functional — it should be pretty too. His ‘Seven Pillars of Pretty Code’ white paper was in fact included in a book called Beautiful Code from O'Reilly.
O'Reilly clearly likes the good-looking metaphor as last week the publisher announced the publication of Beautiful Testing, a new volume in which leading professionals (allegedly) reveal how they improve software. Refreshingly, the editors’ (Adam Goucher and Tim Riley) first comments on testing are that it should not be a routine process, but a constant exploration of methods and an evolution of good ideas.
One imagines that if this highly iterative approach was paramount in the authors’ minds at the time of writing then the quality of the content within the pages would be of practical and productive use. Like the coding book, this one is comprised of essays from various different authors – 27 in total.
When I was at Qt Dev Days back in October last year I had a conversation with my colleague Tim Anderson (nice blog redesign Tim) during which we weighed up the need to speak to customers for tech stories. Tim enthused that they often the best real-world views of how a technology works as they are the true “practitioners” in question. With that positive thought in mind, Beautiful Code is written with a healthy dose of personal anecdotes. The book has very practical examples and extensive links where the reader can find additional information.
"In each chapter we each learned at least one thing...We both have over a decade of testing experience and have read a lot of material in that time. If we learned something in each chapter, then most readers should as well and that, to us, is the measure of a great resource book," says Goucher in the supporting PR materials.
Without listing the contents page (now that would be lazy blogging taken to the extreme) here’s an idea of the content you can find inside. Microsoft's Alan Page is a large-scale test automation specialist, so he shares some of his secrets on how to make it beautiful. Scott Barber gets out his make up mirror and explains why performance-testing needs to be a collaborative process, rather than simply an exercise in measuring speed. Karen Johnson slaps on an extra dose of lippy and describes how her professional experience intersected her personal life while testing medical software. Finally, mathematician John D. Cook applies a classic definition of beauty, based on complexity and unity, to testing random number generators.
I thought I should also just mention a sub note to this blog as it is a good cause. All author royalties will be donated to the Nothing But Nets campaign to save lives by preventing malaria, a disease that kills millions of children in Africa each year.