Monthly Archives: May 2007

Keeping Rails migrations happy

Posted on 5/9/2007 by Moses

Two quick things we’ve learned about migrations at CDD: Avoid using your model objects in your migrations, e.g. stuff like Group.create!(:name => “Watson Lab”). The problem with this is that later you might add a required field to your model, … Continue reading →

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BDD: Forces and the “given X, when Y, then Z” pattern

Posted on 5/7/2007 by Moses

Thinking more about the issue mentioned in my previous post, I’ve come up with a possible set of forces that push you in one direction or another, that is toward organizing your specifications around method behavior vs. organizing around object … Continue reading →

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CDD community meeting on open R&D for developing world disease

Posted on 5/6/2007 by Moses

Last August I moved out to San Francisco to join a great cheminformatics startup, Collaborative Drug Discovery, as director of software development. Two months ago (March 5th) we had our first user community meeting on open R&D for developing world … Continue reading →

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BDD: specifying domain objects de novo

Posted on 5/6/2007 by Moses

The vanilla example used in most blog posts for BDD is some incarnation of de novo domain object specification, that is, specifying the behavior of a simple domain object from scratch. David Chelimsky’s stack example is a decent online example … Continue reading →

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Behavior-driven development

Posted on 5/6/2007 by Moses

About two months ago at CDD we decided to start using the RSpec Behavior-driven development (BDD) framework instead of the standard Test::Unit unit-testing library. My initial interest in using RSpec was that it provided “contexts” for a bundle of tests/specifications … Continue reading →

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