FreeGuide 0.10.8
July 28, 2008 [FreeGuide, Java, Lean and Agile, Tech, Test Driven]I am still working slowly on moving FreeGuide forward. Somehow it seems my itches for FreeGuide are all about making it less annoying for people who are trying it the first time. I guess this is motivated by my desire for world domination.
Anyway, we are one small step closer to my mum being able to use FreeGuide - when the "Choose channels" step (i.e. the XMLTV grabber configuration) goes wrong, you can now see a real genuine error message, and hopefully figure out what went wrong.
Actually, it always used to work that way but the error-catching got refactored away at some point. Anyway, I am slowly taking the ground back...
As I do more and more test-driven development at work I am becoming completely addicted. For this FreeGuide code I wrote a couple of unit tests but they are not within a proper framework, and can't be launched easily as a test suite. I am considering JUnit.
I also want to set up some component-level tests e.g. for downloading listings for each country and checking everything works as expected. It's brilliant fun having tests in place, but when you have as little time as I have for FreeGuide at the moment, it's difficult to decide to spend a long time working on a test framework when I could be fixing a "real user problem" or adding a cool new feature.
But I've got the testing bug badly, so watch this space.