Functionnal tests help to refactor

After a few month, uning JMeter for my functionnal/integration tests and having included them in the continius build process, I can see major changes in every day work.
First (I knew this one would come up that's why I did it ;-) ) there are fewer bugs (almost none), more self confidence in code and application stability.
Secondly (I hadn't thought of this one first) It helps refactoring since you gain testing time. I can now use this time for refactoring.

Everybody at work says I'm "test addict", I think back then when I hated testing (but did it)...
Automatisation of tests is far more interesting!

Back from Holidays

Back to Work and Coffee after a holidays'week!
Always good to start with a little stand-up meeting with a coffee to know about the recent changes...

Agile Manifesto

Some many famous people in here: http://www.agilemanifesto.org/!
It's like some kind of a freedom declaration act!

Eclipse Cobol

Funny! I spoke yesterday with someone doing cobol... and they have exactly the same problems that me in Java about code that has not been indented neither commented...
Hopefully we have tools such as eclipse to format code automaticly!

Therefore I tried to use cobol plugin for eclipse. Seems nice but no indentation :(
May because of the way you need to write cobol with all the column and stuff...

Refactoring all day long

I spend my entire day refactoring duplicated Date classes.
Thank you JUnit!
But if people before me (and also the actual team) had spoken between us a little more, those classes wouldn't have been duplicated in the first place.
May be I should try to use PairProgramming a little more (even if I don't like it much).

Search and Found

I'm glad to have found DBUnit. Because on (only) two tests, even if i didn't know back then, I had started building my own "DBUnit framework-like"...
I refactored those two tests with DBUnit and now it much more clearer!
That brings me to the point that refactoring tests is also very important since they can esealy become complicate and then hard to extends...

About 2 years ago, I thought learning a new product was not always worst the time investment.
But now I think, with a minimum technical background, learning such things is always good and end up focusing only on the real problems.