clean architecture

Architecture, Quality

I think that everybody agrees that testing is required in order to build a quality product. But there’s also a lot of confusion about the boundaries of each test type. What’s the scope of a unit test? What’s the difference between an integration test, an integrated test and a contract test? If you ask 3 developers about test boundaries, you’ll most likely get 3 different answers. For example, I still talk to people who consider that a unit test should test a single class/method.

What’s clear is that most teams don’t have a consensus on what’s the scope of the different types of automated tests and the differences between them. Getting to a universal consensus might be hard, but getting to a consensus inside the team should be easy enough. In this blog post we’ll see an example of how to do that.

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Architecture, Quality

We have all used code analysis tools on our projects and these are useful for identifying some code smells. The issue is that most of them treat metrics in isolation and isolated metrics can’t tell you if the design is good or bad. You need more context.

In this blog post we’ll see how to go beyond code smells. We’ll see how to identify design smells and inappropriate coupling in the technical architecture. We’ll define detection strategies for common design smells (like God Class and Feature Envy) and implement them using NDepend. Last but not least, we’ll see how we can define fitness functions that detect dependency violations in our application’s architecture.

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