Category: Companies

Ten years ago, programming in D was like starting over in our company. And, of course, unit testing was part of it right from the beginning. D’s built-in simple support made it easy to quickly write lots of unit tests. Until some of them failed. And soon, the failure became the rule. There’s always someone else to blame: D’s simple unit-test support is too simple. A look at Python reveals that the modules doctest and unittest live side by side in the standard library. We concluded that D’s unit test support corresponds to Python’s doctest, which means that there must be something else for the real unit testing.

We’ve always used UML tools to visualize the internal structure and document details of software. That’s true for me not only at Funkwerk, but also in the companies I worked before I joined the team here in Karlsfeld. One of the major issues of documentation is that at some point in time it will diverge from the actual implementation and become outdated. Additionally, if you have to support old versions of your components you will have to take care of old versions of your documentation as well.