There is
a posting on the perl journal about test driven development and how being dogmatic about a quality approach is never fully fruitful. One of the problems in software is feature volatility and
while functional testing offers a mechanism to test features it is also plagued with the same problem.
It has been my experience that unit testing does produce higher quality and more robust code during development. It is more laborious and does take up more time, but the number of times untested code has sucked up two developers for two days each in tracing down difficult and obscure behaviour it is worth it. More so, those that don't cover their code fully with unit tests do have the buggiest code.
There was a time when the bare minimum of quality in a software project was continuous integration and a central source repository. Now, it is unit testing as well. But again, it doesn't require 100% unit testing coverage, or test driven development. One of the things that makes code so durable is that if you get it right once, it tends to work the same forever. So code that has passed QA is normally good for production in most cases, short of gnarly edge cases.
There is also the issue that working code in a crunch environment is valuable, so working code will get pumped out and unit tests skipped. Features are often deemed more important during the development phase and quality only becomes important after feature complete. There is also the issue that quality can be difficult to determine until feature complete anyway as features can be negatively impacted by the different delivery mechanism for data in complex projects when they are incomplete leading to confusing bugs or quality issue reports.
Ultimately however, unit testing has raised the bar on what is the standard for quality in a software project. Codebases without test harnesses of some kind are remiss.
Phoenix Eats Out is the restaurant review site for
Phoenix,
Scottsdale and
Old Town Scottsdale which lists the modernist and contemporary restaurants, taverns and bars in the greater Phoenix area.
This is the list of the most popular restaurants pages from phoenixeatsout.com that have been viewed the most;
My personal favourite restaurants in Phoenix are
AZ88,
Postinos,
Bomberos with
Grazie,
Humble Pie,
Orange Table,
The Vig,
Fez and others coming close behind. View the complete list with the photo-journalistic style images on
phoenixeatsout.com
Arizona is an outdoor state and has lots of hiking in the city and around the state. Phoenix is unusual for most cities in having several large mountains in the center of the city with great hiking. Anyone who comes to Phoenix has to do the
Echo Canyon trail on Camelback and the
Summit Hike on Squaw Peak or Piesta Peak. The views of the city, suburbs and surrounding mountains are wonderful from Camelback and Piesta Peak.
For more experienced hikers there is the McDowell Mountains in North Scottsdale that has several difficult and strenuous hikes in
Tom's Thumb and
Bell Pass. Alternatively, you can hike the highest mountain in Arizona. At 12,600 feet
Humphrey's Peak is a long and difficult hike.
Between 2004 and 2009 this site,
southsearepublic.org, was a constitutional blog based on scoop which focused on Australian and global constitutional issues.
One of the strongest aspects of it was the development of constitutions by those involved in the blog. These constitutions are the outcome:
The constitutions were built using principles from Montesquieu's separation of powers, the enlightnment's universal political rights and the ancient Athenian technology of sortition and choice by lot.
South Sea Republic started in 2004 as an Australian constitutional blog in 2004 based on scoop software. It was an immigrative outgrowth of Kuro5hin. The archives for each year since then;
The articles are ordered by views.
I am an Australian living in the United States as a permanent resident.
I am a software developer by trade and mostly work in Java and jump between middleware and front end.
I originally worked in the New York area of the United States in telecommunications before moving to Washington DC and
working in a mix of telecommunications, energy and ITS. I started my own software company before heading out to
Arizona and working with Shutterfly. Since then I have joined a startup in the Phoenix area and am thoroughly enjoying myself.
I do a lot of photography which I post on this website, but also on flickr. I have a photo-journalistic website which lists
the modernist and contemporary restaurants in phoenix. I have a site on the
Australian Flying Corps [AFC] which has been around since the 1990s and which I unfortunately
lost the .org URL to during a life event; however, it is under the
www.australianflyingcorps.com URL now.
The AFC website has gone through several iterations since the 90s and the two most recent are
Australian Flying Corps Archives(2004-2002) and
Australian Flying Corps Archives(2002-1999) which are good places to start.
