Also known as, “An exercise in Twitter opinionating”:

Sitting in a meeting, I heard one of the other meeting participants say, “You should do your integration testing before your unit testing in your code.”

Now, I wasn’t (and I’m still not) sure I agree with this or not, and when in doubt, I like to get data points. Twitter to the rescue!

The responses that came back were fascinating, and all over the map:

MarkFreedman

Why? Disagree, unless I'm missing something => RT @tedneward: OH: "You should do your integration testing before your unit testing."

kiranhatti

@tedneward disagree! How could an unstable code (not unit tested)be ready for integration testing

bradwilson

@tedneward Write acceptance tests, so we're all on the same page, then use TDD to get components in place until acceptance tests pass.

bradwilson

@tedneward There is value on an agile team for starting with automated acceptance tests, as a stopping function for development effort.

iceX33

@tedneward mostly agree integration first helps to focus on feature, not losing in details

JasonBarile

@tedneward Depends on the intent of the integration testing. If it's to find gaps in the feature set, maybe. Otherwise, disagree.

justncase80

@tedneward disagree. The order depends on what you're creating.

RockyLhotka

@tedneward I continually intermix them; can't say I care a lot about the distinction either in most cases

secos

@tedneward in the sense that you may want to have some of the integration work done before you write the internals, yes.

My next thought was “how do I capture this for further discussion”, so here we go.

Couple of thoughts that occur to me as I read through the responses:

• Are acceptance tests the same as integration tests?
• Are either of these at the same level of scope as unit tests?
• Does it make a difference which order you approach them?

Love to hear your thoughts.

It appears that the jobs widget that I’ve been using is basically kaput. So I’m putting out the call—anybody have a good nomination for a jobs widget to replace it? I’m not interested in making a dime, I just want to help people who want to find work. Suggestions?

Hey, anybody who’s got significant VMWare mojo, help out a bro?

I’ve got a Win7 VM (one of many) that appears to be exhibiting weird disk behavior—the vmdk, a growable single-file VMDK, is almost precisely twice the used space. It’s a 120GB growable disk, and the Win7 guest reports about 35GB used, but the VMDK takes about 70GB on host disk. CHKDSK inside Windows says everything’s good, and the VMWare “Disk Cleanup” doesn’t change anything, either. It doesn’t seem to be a Windows7 thing, because I’ve got a half-dozen other Win7 VMs that operate… well, normally (by which I mean, 30GB used in the VMDK means 30GB used on disk). It’s a VMWare Fusion host, if that makes any difference. Any other details that might be relevant, let me know and I’ll post.

Anybody got any ideas what the heck is going on inside this disk?

My father likes to send me these little inspirational emails. This one sorta caught my eye as particularly…. uh…. well, you decide:

"Every morning in Africa a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up.

It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle - when the sun comes up, you'd better be running. "