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• How can I justify software testing to management?

  - by Nate

  I work for a small company (less than 200 employees) whose software group only makes up a small part of our staff (4 employees, occasionally with a few contractors). The four of us have been making strides in transitioning to better practices, and one of the next logical steps is to improve our testing. As anyone who has done any meaningful tests knows, testing takes a lot of time - and at my company, it takes too much time to justify to management, so we generally do what little we do on the sly. I don't think this is serving us well, as we keep coming up against otherwise avoidable problems when we ship under-tested software. I would like to be able to come to management with a justification for hiring a dedicated software test engineer (someone who can both write automated tests and perform manual ones). Are there any good published studies that show the benefits of adding such a position to a small company? Where can I find information about costs associated with the position? I plan on doing a little number crunching on our own history, but having some external sources to point to would help bolster my case.

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• Dealing with the customer / developer culture mismatch on an agile project

  - by Eric Smith

  One of the tenets of agile is ... Customer collaboration over contract negotiation ... another one is ... Individuals and interactions over processes and tools But the way I see it, at least when it comes to interaction with the customer, there is a fundamental problem: How the customer thinks is fundamentally different to how a software engineer thinks That may be a bit of a generalisation, yes. Arguably, there are business domains where this is not necessarily true---these are few and far between though. In many domains though, the typical customer is: Interested in daily operational concerns--short-range tactics ... not strategy; Only concerned with the immediate solution; Generally one-dimensional, non-abstract thinkers; Primarily interested in "getting the job done" as opposed to coming up with a lasting, quality solution. On the other hand, software engineers who practice agile are: Professionals who value quality; Individuals who understand the notion of "more haste less speed" i.e., spending a little more time to do things properly will save lots of time down the road; Generally, very experienced analytical thinkers. So very clearly, there is a natural culture discrepancy that tends to inhibit "customer collaboration". What's the best way to address this?

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• Should one bind data with Eval on aspx or override ItemDataBound in code-behind?

  - by George Chang

  For data bound controls (Repeater, ListView, GridView, etc.), what's the preferred way of binding data? I've seen it where people use Eval() directly on the aspx/ascx inside the data bound control to pull the data field, but to me, it just seems so...inelegant. It seems particularly inelegant when the data needs to be manipulated so you wind up with shim methods like <%# FormatMyData(DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "DataField")) %> inside your control. Personally, I prefer to put in Literal controls (or other appropriate controls) and attach to the OnItemDataBound event for the control and populate all the data to their appropriate fields in the code-behind. Are there any advantages of doing one over the other? I prefer the latter, because to me it makes sense to compartmentalize the data binding logic and the presentation layer. But maybe that's just me.

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• Is there a more intelligent way to do this besides a long chain of if statements or switch?

  - by Harrison Nguyen

  I'm implementing an IRC bot that receives a message and I'm checking that message to determine which functions to call. Is there a more clever way of doing this? It seems like it'd quickly get out of hand after I got up to like 20 commands. Perhaps there's a better way to abstract this? public void onMessage(String channel, String sender, String login, String hostname, String message){ if (message.equalsIgnoreCase(".np")){ // TODO: Use Last.fm API to find the now playing } else if (message.toLowerCase().startsWith(".register")) { cmd.registerLastNick(channel, sender, message); } else if (message.toLowerCase().startsWith("give us a countdown")) { cmd.countdown(channel, message); } else if (message.toLowerCase().startsWith("remember am routine")) { cmd.updateAmRoutine(channel, message, sender); } }

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• Is it possible to make a MS-SQL Scalar function do this?

  - by Hokken

  I have a 3rd party application that can call a MS-SQL scalar function to return some summary information from a table. I was able to return the summary values with a table-valued function, but the application won't utilize table-valued functions, so I'm kind of stuck. Here's a sample from the table: trackingNumber, projTaskAward, expenditureType, amount 1122, 12345-67-89, Supplies, 100 1122, 12345-67-89, Supplies, 150 1122, 12345-67-89, Supplies, 250 1122, 12345-67-89, Misc, 50 1122, 12345-67-89, Misc, 100 1122, 98765-43-21, General, 200 1122, 98765-43-21, Conference, 500 1122, 98765-43-21, Misc, 300 1122, 98765-43-21, Misc, 100 1122, 98765-43-21, Misc, 100 I want to summarize the amounts by projTaskAward & expenditureType, based on the trackingNumber. Here is the output I'm looking for: Proj/Task/Award: 12345-67-89 Expenditure Type: Supplies Total: 500 Proj/Task/Award: 12345-67-89 Expenditure Type: Misc Total: 150 Proj/Task/Award: 98765-43-21 Expenditure Type: General Total: 200 Proj/Task/Award: 98765-43-21 Expenditure Type: Conference Total: 500 Proj/Task/Award: 98765-43-21 Expenditure Type: Misc Total: 500 I'd appreciate any help anyone can give in steering me in the right direction.

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• How to design highly scalable web services in Java?

  - by Kshitiz Sharma

  I am creating some Web Services that would have 2000 concurrent users. The services are offered for free and are hence expected to get a large user base. In the future it may be required to scale up to 50,000 users. There are already a few other questions that address the issue like - Building highly scalable web services However my requirements differ from the question above. For example - My application does not have a user interface, so images, CSS, javascript are not an issue. It is in Java so suggestions like using HipHop to translate PHP to native code are useless. Hence I decided to ask my question separately. This is my project setup - Rest based Web services using Apache CXF Hibernate 3.0 (With relevant optimizations like lazy loading and custom HQL for tune up) Tomcat 6.0 MySql 5.5 My questions are - Are there alternatives to Mysql that offer better performance for what I'm trying to do? What are some general things to abide by in order to scale a Java based web application? I am thinking of putting my Application in two tomcat instances with httpd redirecting the request to appropriate tomcat on basis of load. Is this the right approach? Separate tomcat instances can help but then database becomes the bottleneck since both applications access the same database? I am a programmer not a Db Admin, how difficult would it be to cluster a Mysql database (or, to cluster whatever database offered as an alternative to 1)? How effective are caching solutions like EHCache? Any other general best practices? Some clarifications - Could you partition the data? Yes we could but we're trying to avoid it. We need to run a lot of data mining algorithms and the design would evolve over time so we can't be sure what lines of partition should be there.

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• Need an idea for an iOS project for a trainee to prove his skills

  - by Umair Khan Jadoon

  I am teaching iOS development to a trainee who has recently joined our startup. He already has strong background and experience in .net. At first phase, he will learn the following things: Basics of Objective C. Views and View Controllers(Navigation, Table, Tabs), gester recognizers, table views, segues etc. Protocols, gesters, delegates. Blocks and multithreading. Now, I have to give him some kind of homework assignment or project to get his skills to action and to know what he has learnt. Any ideas?

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• program logic of printing the prime numbers

  - by Vignesh Vicky

  can any body help to understand this java program it just print prime n.o ,as you enter how many you want and it works good class PrimeNumbers { public static void main(String args[]) { int n, status = 1, num = 3; Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in); System.out.println("Enter the number of prime numbers you want"); n = in.nextInt(); if (n >= 1) { System.out.println("First "+n+" prime numbers are :-"); System.out.println(2); } for ( int count = 2 ; count <=n ; ) { for ( int j = 2 ; j <= Math.sqrt(num) ; j++ ) { if ( num%j == 0 ) { status = 0; break; } } if ( status != 0 ) { System.out.println(num); count++; } status = 1; num++; } } } i dont understand this for loop condition for ( int j = 2 ; j <= Math.sqrt(num) ; j++ ) why we are taking sqrt of num...which is 3....why we assumed it as 3?

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• 45 minutes to talk about C# [closed]

  - by Philip

  I have the opportunity to give a 45 minute talk on C# in the theory of programming languages class I'm taking. The college teaches Java almost exclusively, so that's what all the students are most familiar with. (There's a little C, assembly, Prolog and LISP as well.) I decide what to talk about. It seems to me the best approach is to focus on a few of the big, obvious differences between C# and Java. I don't intend it to be a recommendation to use C# -- there are reasons to use each, mostly because of their ecosystems. So I want to focus on C# as a language. I don't want to go too fast and end up listing a whole bunch of features without showing their usefulness. My current plan is this: Functions as first class objects. This is, in my opinion, one of the biggest differences between C# and Java. The professor briefly mentioned this notion and showed a LISP example, but many of the students have probably never used it. I can show real world examples where it's made my code more readable. Lambda expressions as concise syntax for anonymous functions. Obviously with examples to show how this is useful. The real hit-home examples will be at the end when it's combined with the rest. I don't see an advantage to first showing the old delegate syntax and then replacing it with lambdas -- most of us won't have ever seen delegates anyway so it would just be confusing. The yield keyword and how it's different from returning an array. I have the impression that a lot of C# developers aren't familiar with how to use this. It will likely be very foreign to Java developers. I have some examples from my own work where it was really useful, such as iterating over a tree traversal, or iterating over neighbors in a graph where the neighbors aren't stored in memory. In both cases, doing it in Java would likely mean returning a complete list -- with yield I can stop iterating if I find what I want early on, without using memory for superfluous lists or arrays. Extension methods as a way to write implementation on interfaces. We'll all be familiar with how interfaces don't allow method implementation, and how this leads to code duplication. I'll show a specific example of this and how the extension method can solve the problem. Demonstrate how the above can be combined by implementing some simple Linq methods and using them. Where, Select, First, maybe more depending on how much time is left. Ideas on which ones might 'hit home' the best? There are other things I could talk about such as generics, value types, properties and more. I haven't yet though of good ways to incorporate these. In the case of generics and value types, the advantages might not be obvious or as relevant. Properties are obviously useful, particularly since we're taught strict JavaBeans here, but I don't know if I could integrate it with the "path to Linq" discussion above without it feeling tacked on. So I'm looking for thoughts on how to talk about C#, and what to talk about. Even minor details. I'm sure there are more experienced C# developers than me here who have good insight about what's really important in the language, and what would miss the point.

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• Why don't research papers that mention custom software release the source code?

  - by Antoine

  Is there a reason why the source code of softwares mentioned in research papers is not released ? I understand that research papers are more about the general idea of accomplishing something than implementation details, but I don't get why they don't release the code. For example, in this paper ends with: Results The human line drawing system is implemented through the Qt framework in C++ using OpenGL, and runs on a 2.00 GHz Intel dual core processor workstation without any additional hardware assistance. We can interactively draw lines while the system synthesizes the new path and texture. Do they keep the source code closed intentionally because of a monetization they intend to make with it, or because of copyright ?

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• Should companies require developers to credit code they didn't write?

  - by sunpech

  In academia, it's considered cheating if a student copies code/work from someone/somewhere else without giving credit, and tries to pass it off as his/her own. Should companies make it a requirement for developers to properly credit all non-trivial code and work that they did not produce themselves? Is it useful to do so, or is it simply overkill? I understand there are various free licenses out there, but if I find stuff I like and actually use, I really feel compelled to give credit via comment in code even if it's not required by the license (or lack thereof one).

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• Algorithm to use for shop floor layout?

  - by jkohlhepp

  I ran into a classroom problem yesterday (business oriented class, not computer science) and I found it interesting from an algorithmic perspective. The problem goes something like this: Assume there is a shop floor with N different rooms, and you have N different departments that need to go in those rooms. The departments and the rooms are all the same size, so any department could go in any room. There is a known travel distance from each room to each other room. There is also a known amount of trips necessary from one department to another (trips are counted the same regardless which room they originate from, so a trip from A to B is equivalent to a trip from B to A). Given those inputs, determine a layout of departments into rooms which minimizes travel time. What is the best way to approach this problem algorithmically? Is there already a particular algorithm or class of algorithms designed to solve this type of problem? Does this type of problem have a name in computer science? I am not looking for you to design an algorithm to solve this, although feel free to do so if you would like. I'm wondering if this is a problem space that has already been well defined and studied algorithmically and if so get some links to research further. I can see a lot of different data structures and algorithms that might apply to this and I'm curious which approach would be "best". And don't worry, you are not doing my homework for me. This is not a homework problem per se, as this is a business course and we were simply discussing the concepts and not trying to solve the problem algorithmically.

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• How to deal with cargo-cult programming attitude?

  - by Aivar

  I have some students (in introductory programming course) who see programming language as a set of magic spells, which must be cast in order to achieve some effect (instead of seeing it as a flexible medium for expressing his idea of solution). They tend to copy-paste code from previous similarly sounding assignments without considering the essence of the problem. Can anyone recommend some exercises or analogies to make those students more confident that they can and should understand the structure and meaning of each piece of code they write?

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• Workflow versioning

  - by Nitra

  I believe I have a fundamental misunderstanding when it comes to workflow engines which I would appreciate if you could help me sort out. I'm not sure if my misunderstanding is specific to the workflow engine I'm using, or if it's a general misunderstanding. I happen to use Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF). TLDR-version WWF allows you to implement business processes in long-running workflows (think months or even years). When started, the workflows can't be changed. But what business process can't change at any time? And if a business process changes, wouldn't you want your software to reflect this change for already started 'instances' of the business process? What am I missing? Background In WWF you define a workflow by combining a set of activites. There are different types of activities - some of them are for flow control, such as the IfElseActivity and the WhileActivty while others allows you to perform actual tasks, such as the CodeActivity wich allows you to run .NET code and the InvokeWebServiceActivity which allows you to call web services. The activites are combined to a workflow using a visual designer. You pretty much drag-and-drop activities from a toolbox to a designer area and connect the activites to each other. The workflow and activities have input paramters, output parameters and variables. We have a single workflow which sometimes runs in a matter of a few days, but it may run for 5-6 months. WWF takes care of persisting the workflow state (what activity are we currently executing, what are the variable values and so on). So far I think WWF makes sense. Some people will prefer to implement a software representation of a business process using a visual designer over writing all of it in code. So what's the issue then? What I don't really get is the following: WWF is designed to take care of long-running workflows. But at the same time, WWF has no built-in functionality which allows you to modify the running workflows. So if you model a business process using a workflow and run that for 6 months, you better hope that the business process does not change. Because if it do, you'll have to have multiple versions of the workflow executing at the same time. This seems like a fundamental design mistake to me, but at the same time it seems more likely that I've misunderstood something. For us, this has had some real-world effects: We release new versions every month, but some workflows may run for a year. This means that we have several versions of the workflow running in parallell, in other words several versions of the business logics. This is the same as having many differnt versions of your code running in production in the same system at the same time, which becomes a bit hard to understand for users. (depending on on whether they clicked a 'Start' button 9 or 10 months ago, the software will behave differently) Our workflow refers to different types of entities and since WWF now has persisted and serialized these we can't really refactor the entities since then existing workflows can't be resumed (deserialization will fail We've received some suggestions on how to handle this When we create a new version of the workflow, cancel all running workflows and create new ones. But in our workflows there's a lot of manual work involved and if we start from scratch a lot of people has to re-do their work. Track what has been done in the workflow and when you create a new one skip activites which have already been executed. I feel that this alternative may work for simple workflows, but it becomes hairy to automatically figure out what activities to skip if there's major refactoring done to a workflow. When we create a new version of the workflow, upgrade old versions using the new WWF 4.5 functionality for upgrading workflows. But then we would have to skip using the visual designer and write code to inject activities in the right places in the workflow. According to MSDN, this upgrade functionality is only intended for minor bug fixes and not larger changes. What am I missing?

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• Pointer initialization doubt

  - by Jestin Joy

  We could initialize a character pointer like this in C. char *c="test"; Where c points to the first character(t). But when I gave code like below. It gives segmentation fault. #include<stdio.h> #include<stdlib.h> main() { int *i; *i=0; printf("%d",*i); } But when I give #include<stdio.h> #include<stdlib.h> main() { int *i; i=(int *)malloc(2); *i=0; printf("%d",*i); } It works( gives output 0). Also when I give malloc(0), It also works( gives output 0). Please tell what is happening

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• Using an AGPL 3.0-licensed library for extra functionality in an iOS app

  - by Arnold Sakhnov

  I am building an iOS application, and I am planning to incorporate an AGPL 3.0-licensed library to it to provide some extra (non-essential) functionality. I’ve got a couple of questions regarding this: Do I understand it right that this still obliges me to publish the source of my app open? If yes, does it have to be open to the general public, or only to those who have downloaded the app? Does this allow me to distribute the app for a fee?

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• Functional or non-functional requirement?

  - by killer_PL

  I'm wondering about functional or non-functional requirements. I have found lot of different definitions for those terms and I can't assign some of my requirement to proper category. I'm wondering about requirements that aren't connected with some action or have some additional conditions, for example: On the list of selected devices, device can be repeated. Database must contain at least 100 items Currency of some value must be in USD dollar. Device must have a name and power consumption value in Watts. are those requirements functional or non-functional ?

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• How do I write a good talk proposal for a FOSS programming conference?

  - by Andrew Grimm

  I'm hoping to give a talk at RubyKaigi this year, and I'd like to know what makes a good talk proposal. RubyKaigi is a conference run by Ruby enthusiasts (as opposed to it being a trade conference, or an academic conference). The proposal form can be seen here. So far, my draft proposal about a program I'm working on mentions: What the program is useful for and why it is relevant. How it works. What topics it touches upon (such as metaprogramming and testing) Is there anything that I should mention in my proposal? Also, how thorough should I be in my "Details of your talk" section? Should I be exhaustive, or only have a couple of short paragraphs?

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• What should be included in risk management section of software's architecture documentation?

  - by Limbo Exile

  I am going to develop a Java application (a Spring Web application that will be used to extract data from various data sources) and I want to include risk management of the software in the architecture documentation. By risk management (I am not sure if this is the right name) I mean documenting possibilities of what can go wrong with the software and what to do in those cases. At first I tried to draft some lists, including things like database performance decrease, change of external components that the software interacts with, security breaches etc. But as I am not an experienced developer I cannot rely on those drafts, I don't think they are exhaustive. I searched web hoping to find something similar to the Joel Test or to find any other resource that will cite the most popular causes of problems that should be included and analyzed in risk management documentation, but I haven't found much. Finally, my question is: What should be included in risk management section of software's architecture documentation?

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• Software requirements specification, please help!

  - by Nicholas Chow

  For a school project, I had to create a SRS for a "fictional" application. However they did not show us what it exactly entails, and were very vague with explanations. The SRS asked of us has to have at least 5 functional requirements, 5 non functional requirements and 1 constraint. Now I have tried my best to make one however I think there are still a lot of mistakes in it. Could you all please look at it and provide me with some feedback on which parts I can improve or just tell me which parts are plain out wrong and how to make it better? (The project has a maximum of 12 pages so it is a bit long, I will post it below. FR1 Registration of Organizer FR1 describes the registration of an Organizer on CrowdFundum FR1.1 The system shall display a registration form on the website. FR1.2 The system shall require a Name, Username, Document number passport/ID card, Address, Zip code, City, Email address, Telephone number, Bank account, Captcha code on the registration form when a user registers.

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• Complex Release Vehicle Management

  - by Sharon

  I'm looking into improving our build and release system. We are a .Net/Windows shop, and I don't see any really good tools for Windows for generating the files that are to be dropped in patch or hotfix. We are currently using TFSBuild 2010 with Windows Workflows for our continuous integration builds as well as our daily full build which includes an Installshield package for deployment. What is a good way of generating the list of files to be included in a "patch" style release, where one does not redistribute all the files, but only those necessary to accomplish the necessary changes? Are there any open source tools that work well for this, or do teams usually roll their own? I have considered using Beyond Compare but I would prefer something open source. The file "patch" creation must be 100% automatable. Which release vehicles really ought to be patch style? And which releases should replace all system files related to our application? Assume we have a very large amount of resources necessary to maintain. Is there any established material that is trusted within the industry for strategies about this? I realize it is different for "enterprise" rather than with typical websites. I am looking more for "enterprise" strategies due to our product distribution style. tl;dr Looking for info on how to ship more reliable packages?

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• Using <= for every dependency in case of following semantic versioning idea

  - by zerkms

  As Semantic Versioning (and common sense) declares - the major version is incremented in case if non backward compatible change is introduced. Now let's assume we have a project called Project that has a current version 1.0.42 and a library Lib it depends on that is of a 2.1.3 version at the moment. Does that mean that following semver ideology we should constraint the dependency of the Project to be Depends: Lib (< 3)? From my experience - no one does that, but I find it semantically correct and very self-descriptive. What do you think of this?

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• Is there a good book to grok C++?

  - by Paperflyer

  This question got me thinking. I would say I am a pretty experienced C++ programmer. I use it a lot at work, I had some courses on it at the university, I can understand most C++ code I find out there without problems. Other languages you can pretty much learn by using them. But every time I use a new C++ library or check out some new C++ code by someone I did not know before, I discover a new set of idioms C++ has to offer. Basically, this has lead me to believe that there is a lot of stuff in C++ that might be worth knowing but that is not easily discoverable. So, is there a good book for a somewhat experienced C++ programmer to step up the game? You know, to kind of 'get' that language the way you can 'get' Ruby or Objective-C, where everything just suddenly makes sense and you start instinctively knowing 'that C++ way of thing'?

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• Have unit test generators helped you when working with legacy code?

  - by Duncan Bayne

  I am looking at a small (~70kLOC including generated) C# (.NET 4.0, some Silverlight) code-base that has very low test coverage. The code itself works in that it has passed user acceptance testing, but it is brittle and in some areas not very well factored. I would like to add solid unit test coverage around the legacy code using the usual suspects (NMock, NUnit, StatLight for the Silverlight bits). My normal approach is to start working through the project, unit testing & refactoring, until I am satisfied with the state of the code. I've done this many times in the past, and it's worked well. However, this time I'm thinking of using a test generator (in particular Pex) to create the test framework, then manually fleshing it out. My question is: have you used unit test generators in the past when commencing work on a legacy codebase, and if so, would you recommend them? My fear is that the generated tests will miss the semantic nuances of the code-base, leading to the dreaded situation of having tests for the sake of the coverage metric, rather than tests which clearly express the intended behaviour in code.

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• unit/integration testing web service proxy client

  - by cori

  I'm rewriting a PHP client/proxy library that provides an interface to a SOAP-based .Net webservice, and in the process I want to add some unit and integration tests so future modifications are less risky. The work the library I'm working on performs is to marshall the calls to the web service and do a little reorganizing of the responses to present a slightly more -object-oriented interface to the underlying service. Since this library is little else than a thin layer on top of web service calls, my basic assumption is that I'll really be writing integration tests more than unit tests - for example, I don't see any reason to mock away the web service - the work that's performed by the code I'm working on is very light; it's almost passing the response from the service right back to its consumer. Most of the calls are basic CRUD operations: CreateRole(), CreateUser(), DeleteUser(), FindUser(), &ct. I'll be starting from a known database state - the system I'm using for these tests is isolated for testing purposes, so the results will be more or less predictable. My question is this: is it natural to use web service calls to confirm the results of operations within the tests and to reset the state of the application within the scope of each test? Here's an example: One test might be createUserReturnsValidUserId() and might go like this: public function createUserReturnsValidUserId() { // we're assuming a global connection to the service $newUserId = $client->CreateUser("user1"); assertNotNull($newUserId); assertNotNull($client->FindUser($newUserId); $client->deleteUser($newUserId); } So I'm creating a user, making sure I get an ID back and that it represents a user in the system, and then cleaning up after myself (so that later tests don't rely on the success or failure of this test w/r/t the number of users in the system, for example). However this still seems pretty fragile - lots of dependencies and opportunities for tests to fail and effect the results of later tests, which I definitely want to avoid. Am I missing some options of ways to decouple these tests from the system under test, or is this really the best I can do? I think this is a fairly general unit/integration testing question, but if it matters I'm using PHPUnit for the testing framework.

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