ColdFusion Alive

https://youtu.be/rBUa6HbL48c

Dee Sadler talks about “Design Thinking for CFers (10 tips for better apps)” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Episode highlights

Design thinking

Hands-on UX problem solving, human-centered,

iterating loop

Ideating, prototyping, development, usability testing

Goes well with Agile

MVP (Minimum Viable Product) vs perfect

So get user feedback

Design for future vision and plan vs Frankenstein piecemeal design

Solving user problems/workflow vs adding features

User stories

Business needs + user needs - pain points

User interviews

UX > UI

Keys

1. Empathetic

User avatar(s)/persona(s) and demographics and motivations

80/20 focus

Always be observing (users) in the wild

2. Contextual

You want the user to be aware of where they are in their journey.

3. Human

Friendly, trustworthy, transparent

4. Discoverable

Make things obvious, purposeful and discoverable.

Fewer buttons, colors

Clear CTA (Call To Action) on each page

5. Intuitive

Easy to use

Strong visual hierarchy

6. Clear and Concise

Remove irrelevant information or tools before reaching the user objective — get to the point

7. Learnable

No one wants to use a product that is ridiculously difficult to learn — dumb it down!

8. Efficient

Fast to do tasks. Including on different device

9. Delightful

Using your app is fun and has nice surprises

10. Better

Constant improvement

Constant usability testing

Storming a hill method

Who = user

What  = user task

Wow = measurable and time-bound success

→ epics and stories

Why are you proud to be UX director?

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Mentioned in this episode

10 UX Design Fundamentals Developers Should Learn

Design Thinking — Not Just For Designers

11 reasons why a developer should learn design

Designing for developers

UX Design for Developers

The Designer-Developer workflow conference (no longer running, site closed)

Her podcast D2WC

CFUnited

Bio

Dee has been in the UX world for 20+ years doing all aspects of User Experience from front-end, visual, interaction, and research. She recently was at IBM Watson Health where she was responsible for the Designers in Cambridge, the Consumer Health pillar and Watson for Genomics. She loves mentoring new UX’ers and is involved with the greater UX community and on the Board of Directors for UXPA LA. Currently a UX Director for Cox Automotive in New York.

Design links

My personal portfolio

Twitter 

Interview transcript

Michaela 0:00

Welcome back to the show. I'm here today with Dee Sadler, and you may know from CF united where she spoke many times all about design things, which Guess what, that's what I'm going to do about today. Design Thinking for ColdFusion developers. And we're going to learn 10 tips to make your apps totally amazing. And if you don't know Dee, she used to run a whole conference on design, as well as speaking at ColdFusion conferences. She's been doing UX work for 20 plus years. And from the front end visual interactive research. And she's now in charge of herding cats. I mean, now she's in charge of a whole UX team of designers who are very easy to work with.

And she is in based in now in New York City, though she did a little stint in in Boston recently. So she's currently UX director for Cox automotive, and she's also on the board of directors for UX PA, whatever. What is UX PA, Dee?

Dee Sadler 1:04

It's a UX organization national. I mean, it's an international organization.

Michaela 1:09

Oh, alright. You're the Big Cheese, then?

Dee Sadler 1:12

No, oh, no, no, no, no, I just, I'm on the board. I'm on board of directors, or the LA chapter.

Michaela 1:21

Great. So we're looking at how to use design thinking for ColdFusion developers. And maybe we ought to just start off with what the heck is design thinking, because not everyone may have come across that and and then we'll look at why CFers should be using this.

Read more

Jorge Reyes talks about ColdFusion High-Performance Teams with some tips in this episode of ColdFusion Alive Podcast with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

Why High-Performance Teams

Distrust

Fear conflict

Lack of commitment

Avoid accountability

Inattention to results

What do you mean by High Performance

Efficient

Reliable

Effective

Consistent

Predictable - Product expected results

The Projectized Organization

PM is king

People > Process

Servant Leadership

Team rules and processes

Help team members grow in tech and interpersonal skills

Generalizing specialists

Empower and encourage emerging leaders

Learn team motivators and demotivators

Encourage communication via slack or other collaboration tools

Shield team from distractions

Track performance and forecast

Share project Vision

Agile teams vs hierarchical teams

Self-organizing

Servant Leader-Facilitator

Everyone knows their Roles

Biz representatives - does and don’t

Can

Prioritizes features

Makes change requests

Provides the acceptance criteria

Can not

Change features or priorities

Decide due date

Attend planning meetings or retrospectives

Scrum master

Facilitates team and biz reps

Coaches

Servant leader

Follows up

Project sponsor

Dev team

Front End

Code

Test

DevOps

Team > lone development or talent

Even if Luis the CEO is on the team

Team Evolution

Forming → storming → norming → performing

High-Performance Teams

Performing stage of team evolution

< 12 members

Complementary skills

Generalizing Specialists

Can switch roles and hence resolve bottlenecks

Committed to the common vision

Buy into the company culture

Team members are seen as important to the project

Mutual accountability

Shared ownership of project outcome

Skill learning

Mentors

Shu-Ha-Ri skill mastery

Dreyfus model

Novice → Beginner → Competent → Proficient → Expert

Motivation

Experimenting and Failing safely

Constructive disagreement

Honesty, transparent

Values > tech skills

“Throwing people into the fire”

A hard task a bit above what they already know

with the support of mentors

For growth and motivation

Distributed teams

Team tools

Video conferencing - Zoom

Cameras on to see body language

Focus on meeting

IM - Slack and email

Keban boards - Trello, JIRA

Online calendar - Google, Outlook, iCal

Conf call tips

Keep to time limits (15 min for stand-ups)

Have a timekeeper on the team who pays attention and reminds

Culture of integrity

Start on time and end on time

Agenda

Very clear of expectations - be up front of my role as the meditator for meeting

Document and record

Burndown chart

Burn up chart

Estimating release date

Team velocity

CF summit

Luis, Gavin, Jon from Ortus are speaking

Post-summit training on ColdBox (2 days)

Ortus Roadshow - containers 2?

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at CF Summit in Las Vegas?

Mentioned in this episode

CF Suicide episode

Slides 

Book Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders by L. David Marquet  

079 Help Your ColdFusion Team Find Flow (7 keys to PM success) with Christine Ballisty

060 Virtual Power Teams for ColdFusion Development (3 mistakes to avoid) with Peter Ivanov

Stand up = daily stand up meeting = Scrum

Zoom

Slack

Trello

JIRA cloud

Into The Box conference

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Jorge Reyes

Jorge is a passionate Industrial Engineer born in El Salvador with 7 years of experience managing projects. Business manager at Ortus Solutions, Corp.

Links

Email: Jreyes (at) ortussolutions.com

Twitter

Ortus Solutions, Corp

Interview Transcript

Michaela:

Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Jorge Reyes from Ortus solutions, and we're gonna be talking about high performance cold fusion teams. We've got 15 tips and techniques that can make your competition teams really blossom. So we'll look at why you might want to have a high performance team. You don't have one already, and what exactly who he means by that. And we'll also look at how you can support your people over the process. And agile teams when everyone knows that we're all and you can help the T team and the team members evolve and look at some different ways you can improve the skills of your teams, and also some tool for work with distributed teams. So welcome. Whoa. Hey,

Jorge Reyes:

Michael. Thanks for having me again.

Michaela:

know, so yeah, you're so welcome. So maybe we should just start out with, you know, why should someone have a high-performance team? I know, that seems to seem we have a silly question, but not everyone has them.

Read more

 

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Mike Brunt talks about “ColdFusion and the Blockchain Revolution” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

 

Shoe notes

What is the Blockchain?

DLT = Distributed Ledger Technology

Transactions and identities

2009 Bitcoin launch - decentralized value exchange, peer to peer

Etherium - BLT plus code (DAPs)

Easier to use

Coins based on ETH

Ethereum Solidity (like Javascript)

Smart Contract

Other blockchains

Compare Blockchain to a network level protocol

Compare Blockchain to music P2P (distributed) vs Napster (centralized)

Disintermediation

Permissioned vs Permissionless blockchain (self-governing)

Why does it matter to CFers?

Blockchain uses REST API

CF is the easiest way to create apps that use REST API

Calling Blockchain APIs from CF using the API manager

Using CF as the best glue between the blockchain and databases

The data req in a blockchain app is still in databases

CommandBox now officially supported by Adobe

Blockchain projects that Mike is working on

Land Dollar - coin backed by land

Digi FreeLabs - biofuels

AI and Blockchain

JVM tuning and AI?

Blockchain vs GDPR approach to privacy

Ownership of your own data

Self-sovereign identity - control which parts of your data you share

Blockchain evolution vs web evolution and CF

Lack of developers

H1B

Overhyped

CF revolutionized web development

EOS $4 Billion raised

CF and Java for blockchain development

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

CFUGs

Sample apps

ForgeBox

What did you enjoy at CF Summit West last year?

Mentioned in this episode

Ethereum

Bitcoin

Ethereum Solidity

Go-lang (Google)

Blockchain groupings hyperledger Linux foundation (Apache founder)

Visual dev tools

Eugene, OR Blockchain user group

Digi FreeLabs

IDX broker

Industry 4.0 and IoT

Digital Twin

Estonian e-residency

Goldman Sachs 300,000 hours of legal work done by an AI legal system

FusionReactor

SeeFusion

GDPR

Self sovereign identity

Dock.io

Sovrin

Indy hyperledger project for self sovereign identity

Bitcoin News

ForgeBox

ColdBox

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Mike Brunt

Mike Brunt was born in Northern England in 1948.  It was a time of austerity for the British people who had rationing in place due to the effects of the Second World War.  He pursued a management career in transportation equipment becoming Director of Excess Stock at British Leyland Truck and Bus.  He moved to the USA in 1989 and eventually took up a career path in technology, coinciding with the emergence of the World Wide Web.  Mike then became involved in Teleradiology working alongside Kodak, Lucent Technologies and GTE. Currently Mike is still deeply involved in technology, being a specialist in capacity planning and tuning for Java systems and he is becoming ever more involved with Blockchain and peer-to-peer based infrastructure.

In addition to his career path Mike is a composer and musical having been involved in the creation of 11 electronic music albums, Mike also paints with well over 100 paintings located in Los Angeles, New Zealand and Eugene Oregon.  Lastly Mike is a Permaculture Certified Designer and lives on a 5 acre farm in the Eugene area of Oregon.

Mike Brunt is also known as CF Whisperer.

Links

Twitter

FaceBook

Instagram

CF Whisperer

Java Mem

JVM Services

Interview Transcript:

Michaela 0:00

Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Mike Brunt sometimes known as the CF whisperer. And he has been doing cold fusion since version one. And he's an expert at tuning cold fusion web service. And he's done it for many large organizations around the world. And what you may not know about Mike, he's also a music composer, and a musician and a painter, and a permaculture. Gardner, I guess, the right phrases for

Unknown 0:28

that.

Unknown 0:28

So

Michaela 0:31

he's a world traveler. He grew up in England and being in Los Angeles, New Zealand, now he's in Eugene, Oregon. So welcome, Mike. Yes, thank you. And thanks for George family meal. You know, a low in Britain when you say having me all I mean, she's pulling from the lake, but that's another story. No, no, we won't do too much like pulling, I'm sure. Right. We are going to be talking about cold fusion and the blockchain revolution. So I'm sure many people listening have heard about it coin and various other blockchain projects. But how can we interact with them using cold fusion? And you know, what does that why true that matter to call cold fusion developers and why cold fusion is the best language to do this in

and some of the blockchain projects that Mike is currently working on, we'll talk about as well as using the cold fusion API manager to make things easier for all this. And if we get time we will wrap a bit about blockchain versus the GDPR PR, European approach to privacy. I think he might have some controversial views there, Mike

Unknown 1:40

never.

Michaela 1:41

Um, and we'll also if we have time talk about blockchain evolution and how that compares to the web development evolution that cold fusion was part of back around late 90s or 2000. So let's start off with just in case anyone listening doesn't know what the blockchain is. Can you just succinctly tell us what what is the blockchain yeah

Mike Brunt 2:06

so I'll start by saying when I shot it to become involved I've started to become involved when if cereal came out it didn't really feel the second biggest name in the blockchain cryptocurrency world

Bitcoin still out there in front even know people criticize criticized it for me to eternity in one way or another. And I'd like to dispel some of those mix too. But so Bitcoin was the first use of blockchain technology. And another another term for blockchain technology, which is probably more accurate nowadays is distributed ledger technology or the LT

Read more

 

Michaela Light is the host of the CF Alive Podcast and has interviewed more than 100 ColdFusion experts. In each interview, she asks "What Would It Take to make CF more alive this year?" The answers still inspire her to continue to write and interview new speakers.

Michaela has been programming in ColdFusion for more than 20 years. She founded TeraTech in 1989. The company specializes in ColdFusion application development, security and optimization. She has also founded the CFUnited Conference and runs the annual State of the CF Union Survey.

 

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Kirk Deis talks about "Better Bug Squashing (New Issue Tracking Tool)" in this episode of ColdFusion Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

What is the problem with how you find bug issues now?

User emails

User phone calls

Text messages

Lack of complete info to reproduce the bug

PM tools can track bugs

Asana, Basecamp etc

Bug and Issue trackers can help you prioritize issues

JIRA, Bugzilla, Fogbugz

Pay by team members and sites

User anger over reporting bugs

Why you need a pro tool for bug reporting

What is The Bug Squasher?

More fun to use - modern sexy clean design

Lean

Screen capture

Future video capture too

App info auto sent

Fun with marketing

Bug Squashing Rap video

To install - Add header to website

Can restrict by IP who can report - great for live apps

How did you come up the idea for The Bug Squasher?

Bad user reporting

His story

Film School - Dream of being Screenwriter

9-5 job SEO and ad agencies

From marketing on the side projects to full service marketing agency

Lots of tech: Web development, PPC, Video production, Email Marketing, Content Creation

His thoughts on the Tech Gig economy

Upwork, Fiverr etc

Why are you proud to help squash bugs?

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

Coupon Code

20Alive for 20% Off

Mentioned in this episode

Bug Squashing Rap video  

The Bug Squasher

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Kirk Deis

Kirk Deis (pronounced “Daysss”) is the CEO of two companies based in Newport Beach, California. Treehouse51.com (ad agency) & TheBugSquasher.com (universal web app). He has been featured in Forbes, online publications and other podcast shows.

Website Links

The Bug Squasher

Treehouse 51

Social Links

The Bug Squasher:

Instagram

Facebook

Twitter

Youtube

YouTube Rap Video

Treehouse 51: 

Facebook

Instagram

Youtube

Twitter

Best way to reach Kirk Deis is to message via the contact form on either site. Option 2 would be to email Kirk Deis at [email protected]

Interview Transcript:

Michaela 0:01

Welcome back to the show. And today we're going to look at better bug squashing if I can get the words out, it's a new issue tracking tool. It just came out a few weeks ago. And I'm here with Kirk dice, who's the CEO of the bug Scotia. And also he runs a whole tech marketing agency called treehouse 51, so we're going to look up what the problem is, with how you're currently getting bugs reported to you, and why the maybe a better way to do it, and we'll look in detail of what the bug squatter can do, and how he came up with the idea of it. And also will, if we have time we'll have we'll ask them about the tech gig economy. Because I know a lot of folks listening sometimes deal with folks on up work or five or whatever. So there's some interesting discussion there as well. So welcome, Kirk. Thanks for having me. Are you doing? Yeah, great. Happy. I probably mispronounced naming names for now. days, right? Yes.

Kirk Deis 1:00

Kirk Deis Yeah, yes.

Michaela 1:02

All right. So what is the problem that listeners, you know, they probably are getting bugs reported to them on their apps. But why? What are they doing that not as efficient as it could be?

Kirk Deis 1:15

So I guess I guess the best way to answer that I told the story of why we why even go through all this stuff. And all of it started spent about 11 months and developments. And we had a client, it was an older lady in her 70s. And she understood the concept of turning on a computer. And that was about it from that, from that point forward. It was like, You guys got to solve mistakes. And we were designing a website for her. And she sent sent me this email. That was no joke. It was like, 10,000 words, single space. It was just, it was a nightmare. And I open it and it's like this long. And then the the bug, the error was all the way in the middle of the message. And it was a slight changes one thing, and I was like, I was like, Thank You, Jesus, that I found it. But then the next thing is, I have to diagnose the problem. So I had to ask her all these follow up questions. Hey, are you on a mobile device? Or you're on a Mac windows? Are you on Chrome? Firefox? Of course, she was on Internet Explorer. So

Read more

 

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Ed Bartram talks about “Assert Control Over Your Legacy Applications (TestBox Quick Start)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

"Unit tests are typically testing the logic within a particular method or group of methods and not anything else that those methods are and that includes external dependencies such as a database. So what we do is we write integration tests which are structured much like unit test to test those external dependencies to make sure that the code that you have that's making those calls out actually work correctly without error and then you can even in the case of database calls insert records into it in order to do your unit tests against let's say, read function to make sure that it's coming back correctly so it's doing what you intended it to do." - Ed Bartam

Show notes

Why unit test?

A unit is a method, function or small group of same

Why do it?

Refactoring is safer

improving quality and reliability of their application

Faster finding bugs when you change code

Better deployment during your build process

What is integration testing

Testing logic vs testing external dependencies

Functional tests with Selenium

What TestBox?

A test creation framework and scripting language

Set up - before test suite is run

Tear down - after test suite is run

Before unit test is run

After unit test is run

Automated vs manual testing

Good automated testing characteristics

Repeatable

Can be run at push of a button

One test

A suite of tests

All unit tests

Works with CI (eg Jenkins or Ant) so tests are run during your build process automatically

Consistent test results independent of the environment (eg database)

Full coverage of all code in the unit

Independent of other tests - can be run in random order - no dependencies between tests

Easy to detect if an error occurs and report on it so you can

Test setup and tear down of dependencies

TestBox does all the above

Need to move code to methods or functions

TestBox tips and best practices

What tests to write

How to name them

Test_[method name]_[When to test]_[Expected enresult]

How to write them

When to write them

TestBox color coding

Tests that pass - Green

Test that fail - Yellow

Test that errors out - Red

Result actions

CI backout the deployment

Slack

Email

Ring a bell via a Raspberry Pi

Who broke the build gets to wear a special hat for rest the day

Free open source

Doesn’t require ColdBox

Paid support is available

CFML slack testing channel

Replaces mxUnit

Mocking and MockBox

Spies and Stubs too

Blackbox unwritten code

Design patterns

What is a legacy application?

Michael Feather book working effectively with legacy code

Test Driven Development (TDD)

Write a little bit of your test before your code

Then write a little bit of code to pass the test

Repeat

Know as “Red-Green testing”

How to install TestBox quickly in your existing environment

CommandBox one line install of TestBox

Or download and manually install

How do we improve our code coverage then?

which prescribes writing tests and then writing code to make those tests pass.

Start with current bugs you are working on fixing

First pull out the queries into methods and writer tests for them

Second pull out logic into methods and write logic

Could move to MVC - but not required

CFMs = views and controller

CFCs = model

Why CFers resist writing tests

Takes too long to writer

Too hard to write tests

Too late to write tests for existing code

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at Into the Box?

Mentioned in this episode

Michael Feather book “Working Effectively with Legacy Code”

TestBox

Selenium

ColdBox

CI

Jenkins

Ant

CFML slack testing channel

MockBox

Test Driven Development

Red-Green Development

CommandBox

MVC

Uma Ghotikar - Intro to Unit Testing, BDD and Mocking using TestBox & MockBox - ITB 2018

Listen to the Audio

 

Session Description:

Topic: Assert Control Over Your Legacy Applications with TestBox

Target Audience This talk is aimed at developers who work in environments having little to no code coverage with unit tests.

Description Developers are more confident making changes to code when it is covered by tests. Tests can be run as part of a business' deployment process improving overall quality. When starting a new "green field" project, this can be accomplished using Test Driven Development (TDD) which prescribes writing tests and then writing code to make those tests pass. But what if we already have a code base written with little or no tests? How do we improve our code coverage then? In this talk I will show you how to install TestBox quickly in your existing environment and how to get started writing tests improving the quality of your code and the dependability of your application. You will learn what tests to write, how to name them, how to write them, and when to write them. Attendees will be able to return to their office and immediately begin writing tests covering their legacy code, improving quality and reliability of their application.

Bio

Ed has been a ColdFusion developer since 2000, first using version 4.5. He is currently co-manager of the Chicagoland CFUG and previously co-managed the Nebraska CFUG in Omaha. While he has not spoken at a conference before, he has given several presentations to both groups. Ed has been a regular attendee of many conferences over the years including Devcon, Max, bFusion, CFObjective, Into the Box, and CF Summit. When he's not slinging code he likes to camp, hike, and work on his 1973 VW Beetle.

Links

Twitter

Ed Bartam website

Interview transcript

Michaela:        Welcome back to the show and today we're going to assert control over you'll legacy ColdFusion applications out with a TestBox Quixtar and I'm here with Ed Bartram. And we're going to look at what is unit testing what is TestBox, what is he think a legacy application is anyway.  We might delve a little bit ancestor of development. I'd look at how to install TextBox quickly and we'll look at issues of Cold coverage and what tests to write and all kinds of other best practices and tips and Ed is talking about this at Into The Box which is in less than a month's time our record date.

And just in case you don't know Ed, he's been developing in ColdFusion since the beginning of the McNally, since the year 2000 that say it that way when ColdFusion was backing version 4.5 and he's the Co- Manager of the Chicagoland CFUG and previously the manager of Nebraska CFUG, so he's got like lots of accolades for CFUG work in the ColdFusion community and he's also been to many ColdFusion conferences so, too many to name I would say. He is an owner, a proud owner of a 1973 Volkswagen Beetle. Probably runs on ColdFusion I'm guessing but, so welcome Ed.

Ed:                  Well, thank you Michaela. It's an honor to be speaking with you.

Michaela:        So let's just start off, what exactly do you define as a unit tests?

Ed:                  Well, unit test basically test the unit. So unit is a small piece of code it could be a single message or function or even a group of message or functions depending on how you want to generate the tests. But units test will tests that unit of code and it will test all branches of logic to make sure that it works well and that it does what it's intended to do.

Read more

 

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Christine Ballisty talks about “Help Your ColdFusion Team Find Flow (7 keys to PM success)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

The role of a digital project manager today

beyond managing tasks, schedules and budgets

Her background in UI and web designer

Hats I wear

Account Manager

Positive biz relationship

Check-in calls

Planning ahead for enhancements

Business Analyst

Requirements and wireframes

Images help

Project Manager

Whiteboard

Support Representative

What is Flow, why is it so important today for you and your team

Flow = complete focus in current task, in the zone

Protect CF developers from interruptions

prioritize

Work smart vs multitask

Many hats

“Spin cycle” - work never ends

Productive, efficient and happy

7 keys to success

Plan for everything

That my team has what

PM tools

Google calendar - multiple calendars, color-coded, vacation tracking, blocking off time

Liquidplanner for resource allocation and projects and due dates and completion date, PDF timelines

Trello - boards of tasks and break by phases and person. Drag and drop cards

Slack with bots and status controls for DND mode

A channel per project

Can be noisy - mute channels, mark self DND, use red emoji for not available

On desktop and phones for immediate response

If Then This That

Monthly time logging reminder

Trello card comment reminder

Fun reminders of birthdays etc

Practice gratitude

Better happiness and productivity and creativity

Leads to flow

Kindness matters - shows that you care, flow more, better relationships with coworkers

Banish ‘the Ego’

Including complaining and negative thinking and talk

Important person in the company, not a cog in the machine

Clear priorities vs urgent - take a step back

Focus on our shared end goals

Music

Above and Beyond (EDM)

Jaytech

Brain.fm

Spotify search for look-alike track

Health is wealth!

Self care before you help others

Block self time in your calendar

Massage

Trip planning

Fun food at lunch

Lunchtime walk with coworkers

Might vent to release problems

Surprise coworkers with a coffee etc

Healthy people are happier and more productive

Care about

Enough Sleep helps me

Busy brain

Lavender essential oil diffuser by bed

Stay off phone by bed - don’t play games in bed

White noise app (fan, rain etc)

Melatonin

Set and shape expectations

Client expectation and reality match

And stay match during project

Evernote recap of all client meetings

Train clients to expect this

No misunderstandings

Less client anxiety

Client can use in their internal communication

Start by listening and reflecting back

Shared goals

Choose your battles

You will have fights - but you can choose which ones to respond to

Find solutions to end goal first

Keep emotions out of it

Have fun!

lastly, but not least of all,

Quarterly fun team events, coffee dates, draw pictures on each other whiteboards

Separate offices shared with one other person

Extra day

Remote developers

screen shares

Daily stand up meetings

Video chats

Liberal Work from home policy

Why are you proud to work with Mura and CF?

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at MuraCon?

Mentioned in this episode

LiquidPlanner

Trello

Slack

Google Calendar

Topic:

The DPM's Guide to Creating Project Flow for Digital Teams

Description:

The role of a digital project manager today goes well beyond managing tasks, schedules, and budgets. DPMs are tasked with communicating direction, interpreting vision, foreseeing issues, managing dependencies and maintaining the health of their team during the process. DPMs are account managers, business analysts, project managers, scientists and sometimes the therapist. Considering this rapidly changing role, there is a lot of opportunity for error. In this session, Christine Ballisty (Sr. Project Manager of Blue River) will share what it takes to be a digital project manager in this day and age and provide insights on how to effectively create a flow for her projects, clients, and her team.

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Christine Ballisty

With almost 10 years of project management experience at the enterprise-level, Christine Ballisty has a wealth of expertise and understanding in effectively conceiving and executing complex software application and web development solutions. Christine has a successful track record of positive feedback from clients, key partners and colleagues with a proven ability to single-handedly manage a pool of onsite & remote Application Developers & User Interface Designers.

As she frequently manages several projects simultaneously, Christine also oversees budgets and cares for project lifecycles in an experienced, proficient and meticulous manner; all in tandem with leading the Project Management Office of Blue River. She currently provides oversight and guidance to a number of project managers and coordinators in the Professional Services division.

Links

Twitter

Instagram

Interview transcript

Michaela 0:01

Welcome back to the show here we're going to look at helping your call fusion team find flow, seven keys project management success. And I'm here with Christine all misty saying your last name right? Because I didn't practice it for a solid I should have done and we're going to look at the role of a modern project manager on cold fusion a mirror projects to hats you might wear as a project manager and what is flow and why is it so important today for you and your team and we'll go through seven keys she has for success in your project. So welcome, Christine. Thank you.

And in case you don't know, she is the Senior Project Manager at Blue River and oversees mega mural, CMS cold fusion projects and keeps them meticulously on track and in budget. So a genius

Yes, she's gonna be speaking on this top pick at Mira con in just three days, I think. Right. So four days a few days. So very exciting. And we'll talk a bit more about miracles later in the episode. But would I look at those different things. And let's just start off with how do you see the role of a digital project manager? I'm kind of curious why you call yourself a digital project manager?

Christine Ballisty 1:26

Yes. So the reason why we've been using the label as digital project manager is because all the projects I manage our digital projects or web sites, their applications on the back end or intranets, things like that they're not construction projects or projects where you have a tangible products that you can hand out at the end of the life cycle. It's all digital based.

Michaela 1:51

And how does that affect what you do?

Christine Ballisty 1:54

Well, for me, it doesn't have too much of an impact, because that's my specialty, you managing digital projects. My specialty is in managing custom application development along with websites and internets. And so for me, having that moniker of a digital product manager is pretty much a perfect fit.

Read more

 

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Sumit Verma talks about “Slatwall ColdFusion eCommerce Unleashed (Beyond Shopping Carts)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

What is Slatwall

Enterprise level eCommerce platform

More than just a shopping cart

A flexible way to build eCommerce websites that integrates easily with other software for payments, marketing, sales, shipping etc

Easy to customize for your individual business processes

In summary, you could create your own Amazon.com clone. But add on subscriptions, events, reviews.

“The headless commerce” - all the backend of eCommerce

Why use an eCommerce platform

Saves a lot time over custom coding

More flexible than a shopping cart

Security

PCI compliant

PA-DSS certified

GDPR

Reliability

SaaS, hosted on AWS

SLA and support

Auto-scaling

Monitoring

Investment

Free Open source for self-hosting

Full service SaaS ad$1500-5000/mo depending on level

Features

Total customization

MVC

Event-driven architecture

Integrations architecture

Collections - Custom data lists

Workflows

Templates (eg email)

Cart abandon email

Inventory notifications

Call any service methods

Automation

Events

Reports

REST API

Product catalog

Subscriptions

Tickets

Digital content

Product reviews

Taxes and shipping

Order management

Customer management

Inventory management

Promotions

Technology

CFML Server: Coldfusion 10+, Railo 4.0.1.003+, Lucee 4.5+

Database Engine: MySQL, Microsoft SQL or Oracle

Hibernate ORM

Operating System: Windows, Mac OSX, Linux

REST API

Integrations

Mura plugin, other CMSs

Payment processing - Stripe, Payflowpro, Authorize.net

Shipping - FedEx, UPS

ERP - SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Netsuite, Micros (SaaS version)

Marketing - Marketo, Hubspot, Eloqua, Salesforce

New features available in Slatwall:

Collections

Pick, Pack, Ship

Accounting and Inventory Enhancements

QuickBooks Online

Other accounting interactions and exports

Point of Sale

Star Micronics m-pop with iPad

Sites using Slatwall

400+ developers using Slatwall

solve very complex eCommerce requirements while maintaining their legacy platforms.

CalPIA

TotalWine

Sotheby's

Inc Magazine

Scientific American

FastCompany magazine

Why are you proud to use CF?

RAD

Fast to get up to speed - cross training developers from other languages

Clean, concise code

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at MuraCon?

Mentioned in this episode

Slatwall 

AWS

His MuraCon session Description:

Topic - Slatwall: eCommerce Unleashed

We take a closer look at some new Slatwall Projects that launched in 2017. Learn how these businesses leveraged the flexibility of the Slatwall platform to solve very complex eCommerce requirements while maintaining their legacy platforms.

CalPIA

TotalWine

Sotheby's

As we review these projects we will also highlight new features available in Slatwall:

Collections

Pick, Pack, Ship

Accounting and Inventory Enhancements

Point of Sale

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Sumit Verma

Sumit brings over 15 years of RIA, web development and technology management expertise to ten24. He is directly responsible for overseeing the development process for each project and managing ten24's technical infrastructure.  Sumit has successfully implemented projects calling on his diverse skills that involve: E-Commerce Applications, ERP Applications, CRM Applications, Client/Server Solutions, System Analysis & Architecture, Database Designing and Administration, for clients such as Working Advantage, Pongo Resume, Stonyfield Farms and White’s Nursery.

Sumit also brings knowledge of core programming languages including: C, C++, COBOL, ColdFusion, Flex, PeopleSoft (Financials, HRMS), CRM (Siebel), Client / Server Solutions (Visual Basic) and Databases (Oracle, MS SQL Server, MySQL) using OOAD methodologies and modeling tools (Convoy DM, Rational).

Links

Slat Wall Commerce

LinkedIn

Twitter

Interview transcript

Michaela 0:01

Welcome back to the show. Today we're looking at snap wall cold fusion e commerce platform and how it unleashes you beyond the shopping cart and I'm here with summit Burma nearly made a mango of your name there. So it is.

And he, he's talking at Mira con in a few weeks. And we will look at what slap wall is, and why you want to use an e commerce platform. And we'll look at some of the amazing features inside that wall, including total order, customer management, inventory management, promotions, automation workflows, customer data lists, or a lot of integrations with other software for marketing, shipping

charging, the credit card mirror, of course, integrates with and we'll hear about some of the new features in slab wall. So welcome summit.

Sumit Verma 1:00

Thanks, Michael, for having me on the show. Glad to be here.

Read more

 

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

John Farrar talks about “Agile ColdFusion API Development (Amazing Postman, ColdBox and Agile secrets)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

Why build APIs in ColdFusion?

Built in

Works reliably

Why APIs

Link to other apps

Separate data connector from biz logic

Microservices

Vue, Angular, React

Why Build in APIs using ColdBox and Postman

Why ColdBox for APIs

Why using ColdBox instead of Coop that you wrote

ColdBox 5 new features for APIs

RESTful principles work well with ColdBox

Why Postman for API

Postman is used by 5 million developers and more than 100,000 companies to access 130 million APIs every month.

Free upto 1,000 calls/month

$8-21/user/mo beyond that depending on the version

Included: 10,000 monitored calls/month, 1 million regular calls

Pre-purchased: $200/month for a pack of 500,000 monitored calls

Postman free is awesome at everything from manual to automated end to end API testing.

Fake out your API

Mock API

Share API calls, folders, workspaces and environments

Document API

Views

Pretty

Raw

HTML

Debug API

Replay an API call

Test API

Part of your CI script

Postman Travis

Newman automated API testing

Smart test sequences

Monitor API

Use the console

What is Agile Dev?

Why should you care?

Regression testing

2 week sprints with 12-20 new features

Git feature branch merge with master branch then run automated tests

Continuous small wins

Fast stakeholders engagement and feedback

Retrospect meeting

What went well

What could have gone better

Vs who messed up

If you are not having fun then something is wrong

Naming sprints with fun name named from Letter of alphabet and random category

Einsteinium (letter E and chemical element)

Frakta (letter F and Ikea item)

More traction

Work as a team, less supervision

Scrum master

Breaks

Fear of sharing problems

Fear of asking for help

Code review

Egoless programming

Remote team: Zoom and Slack video chat and

Live share in Visual Studio Code review

Keeps your own UI preferences

Remote Pair programming

BDD style testing

Focus on critical tests > important tests > mundane tests

Writing a story vs check box testing

End to end integration test

Unit test

TestBox

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at Into The Box?

Mentioned in this episode

ColdBox

Postman 

BDD – Behavior-Driven Development

RESTful principles 

Building REST APIs in ColdBox documentation 

CI = Continuous Integration

Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong

BHAG = Big Hairy Audacious Goal

Agile development

Microsoft Visual Studio Code 

Has a CFML extension

TestBox and ColdBox extension

CFLint plug in

30% of CFers use it 

CommandBox

Mark Drew Docker episode

Into The Box

Session Description:

Agile API Dev

In this session, we will be taking a look at built in APIs using ColdBox and Postman. Yes, postman free is awesome at everything from manual to automated end to end API testing. If you think you know Postman, learn how to do BDD style testing, use the console and much more to build and maintain your APIs like never before.

Listen to the Audio

Bio

John Farrar

John Farrar started programming in the late 70's on a Commodore PET. He served in the U.S.Navy and then met his wife during his reservist years. This was when the Amiga drove his computer interest for several years. Eventually, he became a web developer and in the later 90's he started using ColdFusion building dynamic websites.

With about twenty years of web development, John has become known for his work with jQuery, Knockout and Vue AJAX libraries. Sustainable and profitable come together when the right technology is applied to the correct challenges. John enjoys focusing on a strategy that will bring impact without getting delayed by over-engineering.

Links

Twitter: www.twitter.com/@sosensible

Sos Apps https://www.signalhire.com/companies/sosensible-group-llc

Interview transcript

Michaela 0:01

Welcome back to the show today we're looking at agile cold fusion API development using the amazing postman and some behavior Driven Development secrets and co box with john far. And he's going to be talking on this at into the box in a few weeks time and we'll look at why you should be used building API's and cold fusion and why I'm particularly should be using the postman and co box for doing that and we'll look in detail of what cool things you can get with postman either in the free version or the paid version. So actually, you can get a long way with the paid the free version. And we'll also look at agile development and why you should be doing that. So welcome, john. Thank you. Good to be here. And in case you don't know, john has been in the cold fusion community for millennia, I think or possibly 20 years, one or the other two centuries. That was too

you cross the other century. And he's he's been involved with jQuery and knockout and view libraries. And he brought us cold fusion framework, which we'll talk about a little bit later. So first of all, what let's talk about API's, why should people listening be building their APIs using cold fusion?

John Farrar 1:21

Well, one of the reasons as it works, it's a lot of things we do, we jump in, we don't even know if it's going to work. And we find out there, there's all these, ah, I wish I would have known but in particularly when using cold fusion and called box that technologies, they're cold fusion effect has some API stuff in it, or Lucy that both variations, but call box adds a real mature system. And, and when I talk about that, and particular way to you guys, see, if you haven't started messing with it, bots, five should be out for the show. And it has some nice enhancements along the API line.

Read more

 

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Uma Ghotikar talks about “Fundamentals of Unit Testing, BDD and Mocking (using TestBox and MockBox)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

What is unit testing?

Test small piece of functionality

Low level, small scope, a method, a function, a clause

Why do unit testing

To validate every part of the app whether the UI is ready or not

Easier to know where the bug is located

Faster to run than general user tests, more thorough test coverage of all use cases,  easy to automate

Can write tests before you code

So know where your code needs to raise an error

Guidelines to write unit tests

Fast for immediate feedback (milliseconds) during refactoring and coding

Avoid database, file system, http and API calls - mock them instead

Modular - so can reuse the test

Independent of other unit tests

Robust - work the same independent of time of day etc

Keep them up to date

Clear defined purpose - one piece of functionality

Clear pre-conditions, actions and expected outcomes

When you code make sure you can get the test to fail first before you write code to make it pass

Reactive programming

Most tests are of code in the Model part of MC

Why do you like xUnit and BDD styles of testing?

TDD focuses on testing your low level functions and methods

Tedious to write all these tests

BDD checks you satisfy your customer requirements at high level

User story and scenario

What is TestBox?

Open Source

The Given – When – Then syntax

BDD syntax and xUnit

The general structure for writing unit tests.

Set up, Tear down phrases

What is mocking?

Why do you like MockBox

Open source

What is BDD and why do you like it

High level

CI

How do TestBox and MockBox work together for BDD

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at Into The Box?

 

Mentioned in this episode

TDD = Test Driven Development

BDD = Behavior Driven Development

xUnit

TestBox

CFML slack test channel

MockBox

 

Session Description:

Topic:

Intro to Unit Testing, BDD and Mocking using TestBox & MockBox

This session will cover the basics such as what is unit testing, why to do unit testing and guidelines to write the unit tests. It will then cover xUnit and BDD styles of testing in TestBox, Given – When – Then syntax and the general structure for writing unit tests. We will then look into the mocking and demo examples of unit testing using TestBox & MockBox.

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Uma Ghotikar

Uma Ghotikar has more than 6 years of experience in web application development, database design and development. She has a technical educational background. She did Master of Science in Information Systems from George Mason University, USA and Bachelor of Engineering in Information Technology from University of Mumbai, India. She enjoys coding especially the back-end development and learning new technical skills.

Links

LinkedIn

Interview transcript

Michaela 0:00

Welcome back to the show. And today we're looking at the fundamentals of unit testing, be DD, which is behavior driven development and mocking and using test box and Dropbox, do that, and I'm here with Alma Gattaca. And if you don't know her, she is a cold fusion developer been doing it CFL on cold fusion for six years now. And she is giving a talk on this topic at into the box. So we will cover what is unit testing and why everyone listening should be doing it. And guidelines for writing great unit tests. And then also we'll look in detail at test box. And what it lets you do and how to structure unit tests using it will look at what marketing is and how to do that using mock box and why you want to do that. And we'll also look at behavior driven development or BDD and why you should be doing that and how to do it using test box and mock box together. So welcome oma.

Uma Ghotikar 1:00

Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here. Yeah.

Michaela 1:03

So what is unit testing? For those few people listening? who may not know? Yeah,

Uma Ghotikar 1:10

so yeah, so you're testing is a level of software testing, where, you know, individual units are components of a software testing. And what that means is, the unit is the smallest piece of functionality that can be tested in isolation. So having said that, they are definitely low level they are, they are of small scope. And in procedural language, it could be a function, it could be a method and an object oriented language, it could be a class, our method belongs to a class. So basically, it's the smallest piece of functionality, that's what unit is. And the entire purpose of unit testing is to validate that the each unit of software is performing as design. So that's why we should do unit

Read more

 

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Sumit Verma talks about “Slatwall ColdFusion eCommerce Unleashed (Beyond Shopping Carts)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light. Episode highlighs What is Slatwall Enterprise level eCommerce platform More than just a shopping cart A flexible way to build eCommerce websites that integrates easily with other software for payments, marketing, sales, shipping […]