Two Towers is OUT!

TODAY IS THE DAY! Two Towers is released. I am so excited... and SO SAD. Why am I sad? Because I cannot go. :(

Alan and I were going to go see the matinee today, but my mother-in-law is in the hospital, and yours truely needs to stay with the family, driving them to the hospital and generally being a nice guy for support. The movie will still be there tomorrow... but I was SO looking forward to seeing it on opening day. :( And yes, my mother-in-law will be ok... she isn't on her death bed... which makes this even more sad.

Thats ok though. I'll live. But please NO SPOILERS on yer blogs if you go in the next day or two.

Monday night Alan, Wim and I got together to chew the fat about automated functional and security testing. Evening started off a bit bumpy as I was so looking towards having sushi, only to find the sushi restaurant closed on Mondays. Curse you Japanese Sushi Chef! We settled for Boston Pizza, and then had a good time exploring all the different aspects of it. One conclusion we came to was testing is rarely fun and is really a chore, which is why none of us ever do it. I still don't believe the approach to Extreme Programming is clear on how to do tests before writing code, but I will probably always struggle with that one. I would rather write tests that can insert into the master sources to test, rather that writing little programs to test the function. That doesn't make much sense. Let me restate that. If I have a function called writeXMLConfig(); I don't want to have to strip that code into a simple application so I can run it, and then run my test against it. Lets assume the test simply checks the validity of the XML file that is written out. If I decide I want to change something in the master sources, I have to ALSO remember to change it in the little test app. To easy to forget/screw up. Now, that was never the intent of xtreme programming, as unit testing should have a harness around every function WITHIN the code. But that isn't always practical. Many functions can not be automated as they are triggered from UI events, or external functions we may not have control over. Makes it EXTREMEMLY difficult to test.

Wim sent up some interesting links to the automated testing though. They can be found here on his Wiki. I have been looking at the C/C++ test suite over at Parasoft and trying to see if that makes any sense to use. I get scared when they purposely don't tell you how much it costs on the web site. *shutter*

On that note, I need to go upstairs and see that everyone is alright. Hopefully Jenn's mom will be out of the hospital today and that should relieve some tension around here. Noone likes having a family member in the hispital.. its just nuts. TTYL