The warm blanket of test coverage

A recent email identified that Gldapo struggles to work with password type attributes. I suspected this was going to be the case, but had pushed it aside in the hope that no one would hit the problem until I had time to look at it. Passwords are a bit of a funny case as they aren't really read/write, but there are cases when you do want to read the encrypted password hash.

It turns out that the problem was that I was reading raw context attributes as strings, when I should have been reading them as objects. Passwords seem to be stored as an array of bytes which can't be cast to a string. The fix was not that difficult, but it's fairly low down the stack. Any change that far down could easily have unexpected repercussions.

It pays to have tests

This isn't a new idea by any stretch. But a couple of times I have wondered if I am going a little overboard with the tests for Gldapo. I don't know what my actual coverage percentage is (there is no real solution for Groovy projects built by Maven for coverage at this time) but I suspect/hope that its > 85%. I try to be vigilant about tests for any new feature or change. As an aside, Gldapo development has been a great tool for learning how to test (and coincidentally how much easier testing is with dynamic languages).

The end result

Because of the good test coverage, I was able to make this change and verify that it did not break the public API. I did have to rejig some tests that tested internal API though. This is good news! I know at least this bug fix won't break any Gldapo 0.6 applications when they upgrade to 0.7.

Gldapo Support Email

I never thought I would say this… but I kinda like getting support email. Before my colleagues at work read this and start dumping all support cases on me, I am referring to Gldapo support.

Since it's still a new project really in terms of adoption (first commit was on 07 July 2007 out of interest), support emails are a kind of vindication as they let you know that it is actually being used.

Support requests (ok, they are bug reports) are coming in via the user@gldapo.codehaus.org list which I inherited when the project moved to Codehaus. Thanks again to the Haus.

Behavioural Dominance

As part of a course I am doing through work, I recently took part in a DISC behaviour assessment.

What?

From that link…

DISC is a group of psychological inventories developed by John Geier and based on the 1928 work of psychologist William Moulton Marston.

Not too helpful. Further into the article we get a bit more help…

DISC is the four quadrant behavioral model based on the work of William Moulton Marston Ph.D. (1893 - 1947) to examine the behavior of individuals in their environment or within a specific situation. DISC looks at behavioral styles and behavioral preferences.

D is for DOMINANCE!

So it turns out I am a resounding D. This initially came as a bit of a surprise, but after working through the analysis I had to admit it was right.

Again, stealing from Wikipedia…

Dominance: People who score high in the intensity of the 'D' styles factor are very active in dealing with problems and challenges, while low D scores are people who want to do more research before committing to a decision. High "D" people are described as demanding, forceful, egocentric, strong willed, driving, determined, ambitious, aggressive, and pioneering. Low D scores describe those who are conservative, low keyed, cooperative, calculating, undemanding, cautious, mild, agreeable, modest and peaceful.

That hit's amazingly close to home. In some cases, a little too close.

TextMate Bundles svn win

» svn log http://macromates.com/svn/Bundles -r 10000
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r10000 | ldaley | 2008-06-21 12:33:40 +1000 (Sat, 21 Jun 2008) | 3 lines

• Update GroovyMate to TextMate::Executor.run()

(winnah)
------------------------------------------------------------------------

That's right bitches.

Gldapo (0.6) now hosted @ Codehaus

Codehaus were kind enough to approve my request to have Gldapo hosted there. I have now released 0.6 which lives at new home of http://gldapo.codehaus.org.

This gives me some great stuff I sorely needed. Like an issue tracker and a CI and distribution in the central maven repo.

Now it feels like a real project.