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• How much detail is in a good UI regression test?

  - by GlenPeterson

  We use a detailed step-by-step user-interface regression test for our commercial web application. It has a "backbone" test for the most used / most important parts of the system, with optional tests for specific areas of functionality. Using this plan has definitely helped us ensure high quality software. But, having very specific tests can be counter-productive. The tester concentrates on following the test and will completely miss usability issues, or not notice fairly obvious problems such as the bottom part of a page that is missing. By contrast, some of the best UI testing happens when building a demo of a new feature. I often do my own best testing by pretending to demonstrate the system to an imaginary prospect. Yet when I tell the testers, "Just demonstrate the system to yourself" they don't cover nearly as much functionality as they do with a detailed point-by-point test. I'm repeatedly asked to provide more and more detail in the test plan so that a new untrained tester can test with it without asking any questions. Yet details seem to be counter-productive. How much detail do you put in a regression test to make it effective? What techniques make the tester to focus more on the system than on checking off items on the test?

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• Functional Methods on Collections

  - by GlenPeterson

  I'm learning Scala and am a little bewildered by all the methods (higher-order functions) available on the collections. Which ones produce more results than the original collection, which ones produce less, and which are most appropriate for a given problem? Though I'm studying Scala, I think this would pertain to most modern functional languages (Clojure, Haskell) and also to Java 8 which introduces these methods on Java collections. Specifically, right now I'm wondering about map with filter vs. fold/reduce. I was delighted that using foldRight() can yield the same result as a map(...).filter(...) with only one traversal of the underlying collection. But a friend pointed out that foldRight() may force sequential processing while map() is friendlier to being processed by multiple processors in parallel. Maybe this is why mapReduce() is so popular? More generally, I'm still sometimes surprised when I chain several of these methods together to get back a List(List()) or to pass a List(List()) and get back just a List(). For instance, when would I use: collection.map(a => a.map(b => ...)) vs. collection.map(a => ...).map(b => ...) The for/yield command does nothing to help this confusion. Am I asking about the difference between a "fold" and "unfold" operation? Am I trying to jam too many questions into one? I think there may be an underlying concept that, if I understood it, might answer all these questions, or at least tie the answers together.

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• How do you avoid jumping to a solution when under pressure? [closed]

  - by GlenPeterson

  When under a particularly strict programming deadline (like an hour), if I panic at all, my tendency is to jump into coding without a real plan and hope I figure it out as I go along. Given enough time, this can work, but in an interview it's been pretty unsuccessful, if not downright counter-productive. I'm not always comfortable sitting there thinking while the clock ticks away. Is there a checklist or are there techniques to recognize when you understand the problem well enough to start coding? Maybe don't touch the keyboard for the first 5-10 minutes of the problem? At what point do you give up and code a brute-force solution with the hope of reasoning out a better solution later? A related follow-up question might be, "How do you ensure that you are solving the right problem?" Or "When is it most productive to think and design more vs. code some experiments to and figure out the design later?" EDIT: One close vote already, but I'm not sure why. I wrote this in the first person, but I doubt I'm the only programmer to ever choke in an interview. Here is a list of techniques for taking a math test and another for taking an oral exam. Maybe I'm not expressing myself well, but I'm asking if there is a similar list of techniques for handling a programming problem under pressure?

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• Is there an appropriate coding style for implementing an algorithm during an interview?

  - by GlenPeterson

  I failed an interview question in C years ago about converting hex to decimal by not exploiting the ASCII table if (inputDigitByte > 9) hex = inputDigitByte - 'a'. The rise of Unicode has made this question pretty silly, but the point was that the interviewer valued raw execution speed above readability and error handling. They tell you to review algorithms textbooks to prepare for these interviews, yet these same textbooks tend to favor the implementation with the fewest lines of code, even if it has to rely on magic numbers (like "infinity") and a slower, more memory-intensive implementation (like a linked list instead of an array) to do that. I don't know what is right. Coding an algorithm within the space of an interview has at least 3 constraints: time to code, elegance/readability, and efficiency of execution. What trade-offs are appropriate for interview code? How much do you follow the textbook definition of an algorithm? Is it better to eliminate recursion, unroll loops, and use arrays for efficiency? Or is it better to use recursion and special values like "infinity" or Integer.MAX_VALUE to reduce the number of lines of code needed to write the algorithm? Interface: Make a very self-contained, bullet-proof interface, or sloppy and fast? On the one extreme, the array to be sorted might be a public static variable. On the other extreme, it might need to be passed to each method, allowing methods to be called individually from different threads for different purposes. Is it appropriate to use a linked-list data structure for items that are traversed in one direction vs. using arrays and doubling the size when the array is full? Implementing a singly-linked list during the interview is often much faster to code and easier remember for recursive algorithms like MergeSort. Thread safety - just document that it's unsafe, or say so verbally? How much should the interviewee be looking for opportunities for parallel processing? Is bit shifting appropriate? x / 2 or x >> 1 Polymorphism, type safety, and generics? Comments? Variable and method names: qs(a, p, q, r) vs: quickSort(theArray, minIdx, partIdx, maxIdx) How much should you use existing APIs? Obviously you can't use a java.util.HashMap to implement a hash-table, but what about using a java.util.List to accumulate your sorted results? Are there any guiding principals that would answer these and other questions, or is the guiding principal to ask the interviewer? Or maybe this should be the basis of a discussion while writing the code? If an interviewer can't or won't answer one of these questions, are there any tips for coaxing the information out of them?

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• How long can a user remember what they were working on? [migrated]

  - by GlenPeterson

  A web application lets the user browse its screens for future or past months. The time period the user is currently viewing follows the user through every screen of the system. But users can be logged in for a month or more. After a certain period of inactivity, we will prompt the user: You were viewing November 2008 when you last clicked. Want to view the current (default) time period instead? How long between user clicks should we wait to show this message? I'm guessing somewhere between 30 minutes and 3 hours most people will forget what they were doing, but I'd love to have some data, or someone's experience to base it on. Other suggestions related to this issue?

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• What is meant by, "A user shouldn't decide whether it is an Admin or not. The Privileges or Security system should."

  - by GlenPeterson

  The example used in the question pass bare minimum data to a function touches on the best way to determine whether the user is an administrator or not. One common answer was: user.isAdmin() This prompted a comment which was repeated several times and up-voted many times: A user shouldn't decide whether it is an Admin or not. The Privileges or Security system should. Something being tightly coupled to a class doesn't mean it is a good idea to make it part of that class. I replied, The user isn't deciding anything. The User object/table stores data about each user. Actual users don't get to change everything about themselves. But this was not productive. Clearly there is an underlying difference of perspective which is making communication difficult. Can someone explain to me why user.isAdmin() is bad, and paint a brief sketch of what it looks like done "right"? Really, I fail to see the advantage of separating security from the system that it protects. Any security text will say that security needs to be designed into a system from the beginning and considered at every stage of development, deployment, maintenance, and even end-of-life. It is not something that can be bolted on the side. But 17 up-votes so far on this comment says that I'm missing something important.

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• How do I initialize a Scala map with more than 4 initial elements in Java?

  - by GlenPeterson

  For 4 or fewer elements, something like this works (or at least compiles): import scala.collection.immutable.Map; Map<String,String> HAI_MAP = new Map4<>("Hello", "World", "Happy", "Birthday", "Merry", "XMas", "Bye", "For Now"); For a 5th element I could do this: Map<String,String> b = HAI_MAP.$plus(new Tuple2<>("Later", "Aligator")); But I want to know how to initialize an immutable map with 5 or more elements and I'm flailing in Type-hell. Partial Solution I thought I'd figure this out quickly by compiling what I wanted in Scala, then decompiling the resultant class files. Here's the scala: object JavaMapTest { def main(args: Array[String]) = { val HAI_MAP = Map(("Hello", "World"), ("Happy", "Birthday"), ("Merry", "XMas"), ("Bye", "For Now"), ("Later", "Aligator")) println("My map is: " + HAI_MAP) } } But the decompiler gave me something that has two periods in a row and thus won't compile (I don't think this is valid Java): scala.collection.immutable.Map HAI_MAP = (scala.collection.immutable.Map) scala.Predef..MODULE$.Map().apply(scala.Predef..MODULE$.wrapRefArray( scala.Predef.wrapRefArray( (Object[])new Tuple2[] { new Tuple2("Hello", "World"), new Tuple2("Happy", "Birthday"), new Tuple2("Merry", "XMas"), new Tuple2("Bye", "For Now"), new Tuple2("Later", "Aligator") })); I'm really baffled by the two periods in this: scala.Predef..MODULE$ I asked about it on #java on Freenode and they said the .. looked like a decompiler bug. It doesn't seem to want to compile, so I think they are probably right. I'm running into it when I try to browse interfaces in IntelliJ and am just generally lost. Based on my experimentation, the following is valid: Tuple2[] x = new Tuple2[] { new Tuple2<String,String>("Hello", "World"), new Tuple2<String,String>("Happy", "Birthday"), new Tuple2<String,String>("Merry", "XMas"), new Tuple2<String,String>("Bye", "For Now"), new Tuple2<String,String>("Later", "Aligator") }; scala.collection.mutable.WrappedArray<Tuple2> y = scala.Predef.wrapRefArray(x); There is even a WrappedArray.toMap() method but the types of the signature are complicated and I'm running into the double-period problem there too when I try to research the interfaces from Java.

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• Does immutability entirely eliminate the need for locks in multi-processor programming?

  - by GlenPeterson

  Part 1 Clearly Immutability minimizes the need for locks in multi-processor programming, but does it eliminate that need, or are there instances where immutability alone is not enough? It seems to me that you can only defer processing and encapsulate state so long before most programs have to actually DO something. If a program performs actions on multiple processors, something needs to collect and aggregate the results. All this involves multi-process communication before, after, and possibly during some transformations. The start and end state of the machines are different. Can this always be done with no locks just by throwing out each object and creating a new one instead of changing the original (a crude view of immutability)? What cases still require locking? I'm interested in both the theoretical/academic answer and the practical/real-world answer. I know a lot of functional programmers like to talk about "no side effect" but in the "real world" everything has a side effect. Every processor click takes time and electricity and machine resources away from other processes. So I understand that there may be more than one perspective to answer this question from. If immutability is safe, given certain bounds or assumptions, I want to know what the borders of the "safety zone" are exactly. Some examples of possible boundaries: I/O Exceptions/errors Interfaces with programs written in other languages Interfaces with other machines (physical, virtual, or theoretical) Special thanks to @JimmaHoffa for his comment which started this question! Part 2 Multi-processor programming is often used as an optimization technique - to make some code run faster. When is it faster to use locks vs. immutable objects? Given the limits set out in Amdahl's Law, when can you achieve better over-all performance (with or without the garbage collector taken into account) with immutable objects vs. locking mutable ones? Summary I'm combining these two questions into one to try to get at where the bounding box is for Immutability as a solution to threading problems.

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• What did Rich Hickey mean when he said, "All that specificity [of interfaces/classes/types] kills your reuse!"

  - by GlenPeterson

  In Rich Hickey's thought-provoking goto conference keynote "The Value of Values" at 29 minutes he's talking about the overhead of a language like Java and makes a statement like, "All those interfaces kill your reuse." What does he mean? Is that true? In my search for answers, I have run across: The Principle of Least Knowledge AKA The Law of Demeter which encourages airtight API interfaces. Wikipedia also lists some disadvantages. Kevlin Henney's Imperial Clothing Crisis which argues that use, not reuse is the appropriate goal. Jack Diederich's "Stop Writing Classes" talk which argues against over-engineering in general. Clearly, anything written badly enough will be useless. But how would the interface of a well-written API prevent that code from being used? There are examples throughout history of something made for one purpose being used more for something else. But in the software world, if you use something for a purpose it wasn't intended for, it usually breaks. I'm looking for one good example of a good interface preventing a legitimate but unintended use of some code. Does that exist? I can't picture it.

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• How to avoid jumping to a solution when under pressure? [closed]

  - by GlenPeterson

  When under a particularly strict programming deadline (like an hour), if I panic at all, my tendency is to jump into coding without a real plan and hope I figure it out as I go along. Given enough time, this can work, but in an interview it's been pretty unsuccessful, if not downright counter-productive. I'm not always comfortable sitting there thinking while the clock ticks away. Is there a checklist or are there techniques to recognize when you understand the problem well enough to start coding? Maybe don't touch the keyboard for the first 5-10 minutes of the problem? At what point do you give up and code a brute-force solution with the hope of reasoning out a better solution later? When is it most productive to think and design more vs. code some experiments to and figure out the design later? Here is a list of techniques for taking a math test and another for taking an oral exam. Is there is a similar list of techniques for handling a programming problem under pressure? ANSWERS: I think this is a valid answer: How To Solve It. I found the link as an answer to Steps to solve or approach towards a solution. There were also some really good tips at Is thinking out loud during an interview really the best strategy?. A great and concise argument for TDD is the first answer to TDD Writing code vs Figuring out the answer to a problem?. My question may be a near-duplicate of that one.

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• Using the HTML 'label' tag with radio buttons

  - by GlenPeterson

  Does the label tag work with radio buttons? If so, how do you use it? I have a form that displays like this: First Name: (text field) Hair Color: (color drop-down) Description: (text area) Salutation: (radio buttons for Mr., Mrs., Miss) I'd like to use the label tag for each label in the left column to define its connection to the appropriate control in the right column. But If I use a radio button, the spec seems to indicate that suddenly the actual "Salutation" label for the form control no longer belongs in the label tag, but rather the options "Mr., Mrs., etc." go in the label tag. I've always been a fan of accessibility and the semantic web, but this design doesn't make sense to me. The label tag explicitly declares labels. The option tag selection options. How do you declare a label on the actual label for a set of radio buttons? UPDATE: Here is an example with code: <tr><th><label for"sc">Status:</label></th> <td>&#160;</td> <td><select name="statusCode" id="sc"> <option value="ON_TIME">On Time</option> <option value="LATE">Late</option> </select></td></tr> This works great. But unlike other form controls, radio buttons have a separate field for each value: <tr><th align="right"><label for="???">Activity:</label></th> <td>&#160;</td> <td align="left"><input type="radio" name="es" value="" id="es0" /> Active &#160; <input type="radio" name="es" value="ON_TIME" checked="checked" id="es1" /> Completed on Time &#160; <input type="radio" name="es" value="LATE" id="es2" /> Completed Late &#160; <input type="radio" name="es" value="CANCELED" id="es3" /> Canceled</td> </tr> What to do?

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