From the Book:
“Clean code that works” is Ron Jeffries’ pithy phrase. The goal is clean code that works, and for a whole bunch of reasons:
Clean code that works is a predictable way to develop. You know when you are finished, without having to worry about a long bug trail.Clean code that works gives you a chance to learn all the lessons that the code has to teach you. If you only ever slap together the first thing you think of, you never have time to think of a second, better, thing. Clean code that works improves the lives of users of our software.Clean code that works lets your teammates count on you, and you on them.Writing clean code that works feels good.But how do you get to clean code that works? Many forces drive you away from clean code, and even code that works. Without taking too much counsel of our fears, here’s what we do—drive development with automated tests, a style of development called “Test-Driven Development” (TDD for short). 
In Test-Driven Development, you:
Write new code only if you first have a failing automated test.Eliminate duplication.

Two simple rules, but they generate complex individual and group behavior. Some of the technical implications are:You must design organically, with running code providing feedback between decisionsYou must write your own tests, since you can’t wait twenty times a day for someone else to write a testYour development environment must provide rapid response to small changesYour designs must consist of many highly cohesive, loosely coupled components, just to make testing easy

The two rules imply an order to the tasks ofprogramming:
1. Red—write a little test that doesn’t work, perhaps doesn’t even compile at first
2. Green—make the test work quickly, committing whatever sins necessary in the process
3. Refactor—eliminate all the duplication created in just getting the test to work


Red/green/refactor. The TDD’s mantra.

Assuming for the moment that such a style is possible, it might be possible to dramatically reduce the defect density of code and make the subject of work crystal clear to all involved. If so, writing only code demanded by failing tests also has social implications:
If the defect density can be reduced enough, QA can shift from reactive to pro-active workIf the number of nasty surprises can be reduced enough, project managers can estimate accurately enough to involve real customers in daily developmentIf the topics of technical conversations can be made clear enough, programmers can work in minute-by-minute collaboration instead of daily or weekly collaborationAgain, if the defect density can be reduced enough, we can have shippable software with new functionality every day, leading to new business relationships with customers


So, the concept is simple, but what’s my motivation? Why would a programmer take on the additional work of writing automated tests? Why would a programmer work in tiny little steps when their mind is capable of great soaring swoops of design? Courage.
Courage
Test-driven development is a way of managing fear during programming. I don’t mean fear in a bad way, pow widdle prwogwammew needs a pacifiew, but fear in the legitimate, this-is-a-hard-problem-and-I-can’t-see-the-end-from-the-beginning sense. If pain is nature’s way of saying “Stop!”, fear is nature’s way of saying “Be careful.” Being careful is good, but fear has a host of other effects:
Makes you tentativeMakes you want to communicate lessMakes you shy from feedbackMakes you grumpy

None of these effects are helpful when programming, especially when programming something hard. So, how can you face a difficult situation and:
Instead of being tentative, begin learning concretely as quickly as possible.Instead of clamming up, communicate more clearly.Instead of avoiding feedback, search out helpful, concrete feedback.(You’ll have to work on grumpiness on your own.) 

Imagine programming as turning a crank to pull a bucket of water from a well. When the bucket is small, a free-spinning crank is fine. When the bucket is big and full of water, you’re going to get tired before the bucket is all the way up. You need a ratchet mechanism to enable you to rest between bouts of cranking. The heavier the bucket, the closer the teeth need to be on the ratchet.

The tests in test-driven development are the teeth of the ratchet. Once you get one test working, you know it is working, now and forever. You are one step closer to having everything working than you were when the test was broken. Now get the next one working, and the next, and the next. By analogy, the tougher the programming problem, the less ground should be covered by each test.

Readers of Extreme Programming Explained will notice a difference in tone between XP and TDD. TDD isn’t an absolute like Extreme Programming. XP says, “Here are things you must be able to do to be prepared to evolve further.” TDD is a little fuzzier. TDD is an awareness of the gap between decision and feedback during programming, and techniques to control that gap. “What if I do a paper design for a week, then test-drive the code? Is that TDD?” Sure, it’s TDD. You were aware of the gap between decision and feedback and you controlled the gap deliberately.

That said, most people who learn TDD find their programming practice changed for good. “Test Infected” is the phrase Erich Gamma coined to describe this shift. You might find yourself writing more tests earlier, and working in smaller steps than you ever dreamed would be sensible. On the other hand, some programmers learn TDD and go back to their earlier practices, reserving TDD for special occasions when ordinary programming isn’t making progress.

There are certainly programming tasks that can’t be driven solely by tests (or at least, not yet). Security software and concurrency, for example, are two topics where TDD is not sufficient to mechanically demonstrate that the goals of the software have been met. Security relies on essentially defect-free code, true, but also on human judgement about the methods used to secure the software. Subtle concurrency problems can’t be reliably duplicated by running the code.

Once you are finished reading this book, you should be ready to:
Start simplyWrite automated testsRefactor to add design decisions one at a time

This book is organized into three sections.
An example of writing typical model code using TDD. The example is one I got from Ward Cunningham years ago, and have used many times since, multi-currency arithmetic. In it you will learn to write tests before code and grow a design organically.An example of testing more complicated logic, including reflection and exceptions, by developing a framework for automated testing. This example also serves to introduce you to the xUnit architecture that is at the heart of many programmer-oriented testing tools. In the second example you will learn to work in even smaller steps than in the first example, including the kind of self-referential hooha beloved of computer scientists.Patterns for TDD. Included are patterns for the deciding what tests to write, how to write tests using xUnit, and a greatest hits selection of the design patterns and refactorings used in the examples.

I wrote the examples imagining a pair programming session. If you like looking at the map before wandering around, you may want to go straight to the patterns in Section 3 and use the examples as illustrations. If you prefer just wandering around and then looking at the map to see where you’ve been, try reading the examples through and refering to the patterns when you want more detail about a technique, then using the patterns as a reference.

Several reviewers have commented they got the most out of the examples when they started up a programming environment and entered the code and ran the tests as they read.

A note about the examples. Both examples, multi-currency calculation and a testing framework, appear simple. There are (and I have seen) complicated, ugly, messy ways of solving the same problems. I could have chosen one of those complicated, ugly, messy solutions to give the book an air of “reality.” However, my goal, and I hope your goal, is to write clean code that works. Before teeing off on the examples as being too simple, spend 15 seconds imagining a programming world in which all code was this clear and direct, where there were no complicated solutions, only apparently complicated problems begging for careful thought. TDD is a practice that can help you lead yourself to exactly that careful thought.

Test Driven Development: By Example

When ontologies reach a certain size and complexity, faults such as inconsistencies or wrong entailments are hardly avoidable. Locating the faulty axioms that cause these faults is a hard and time-consuming task. Addressing this issue, several techniques for semi-automatic fault localization in ontologies have been proposed. Often, these approaches involve a human expert who provides answers to system-generated questions about the intended (correct) ontology in order to reduce the possible fault locations. To suggest as few and as informative questions as possible, existing methods draw on various algorithmic optimizations as well as heuristics. However, these computations are often based on certain assumptions about the interacting user and the metric to be optimized.

On the Usefulness of Different Expert Question Types for Fault Localization in Ontologies

Various model-based diagnosis scenarios require the computation of most preferred fault explanations. Existing algorithms that are sound (i.e., output only actual fault explanations) and complete (i.e., can return all explanations), however, require exponential space to achieve this task. As a remedy, we propose two novel diagnostic search algorithms, called RBF-HS (Recursive Best-First Hitting Set Search) and HBF-HS (Hybrid Best-First Hitting Set Search), which build upon tried and tested techniques from the heuristic search domain. RBF-HS can enumerate an arbitrary predefined finite number of fault explanations in best-first order within linear space bounds, without sacrificing the desirable soundness or completeness properties. The idea of HBF-HS is to find a trade-off between runtime optimization and a restricted space consumption that does not exceed the available memory. In extensive experiments on real-world diagnosis cases we compared our approaches to Reiter's HS-Tree, a state-of-the-art method that gives the same theoretical guarantees and is as general(ly applicable) as the suggested algorithms. For the computation of minimum-cardinality fault explanations, we find that (1) RBF-HS reduces memory requirements substantially in most cases by up to several orders of magnitude, (2) in more than a third of the cases, both memory savings and runtime savings are achieved, and (3) given the runtime overhead is significant, using HBF-HS instead of RBF-HS reduces the runtime to values comparable with HS-Tree while keeping the used memory reasonably bounded. When computing most probable fault explanations, we observe that RBF-HS tends to trade memory savings more or less one-to-one for runtime overheads. Again, HBF-HS proves to be a reasonable remedy to cut down the runtime while complying with practicable memory bounds. 

Memory-limited model-based diagnosis

Statistical samples, in order to be representative, have to be drawn from a population in a random and unbiased way. Nevertheless, it is common practice in the ﬁeld of model-based diagnosis to make estimations from (biased) best-ﬁrst samples. One example is the computation of a few most probable fault explanations for a defective system and the use of these to assess which aspect of the system, if measured, would bring the highest information gain. In this work, we scrutinize whether these statistically not well-founded conventions, that both diagnosis researchers and practitioners have adhered to for decades, are indeed reasonable. To this end, we empirically analyze various sampling methods that generate fault explanations. We study the representativeness of the produced samples in terms of their estimations about fault explanations and how well they guide diagnostic decisions, and we investigate the impact of sample size, the optimal trade-off between sampling efﬁciency and effectivity, and how approximate sampling techniques compare to exact ones.

/pdf/random-vs-best-first-impact-of-sampling-strategies-on-fgh85oo8.pdf

Random vs. Best-First: Impact of Sampling Strategies on Decision Making in Model-Based Diagnosis

When ontologies reach a certain size and complexity, faults such as inconsistencies, unsatisfiable classes or wrong entailments are hardly avoidable. Locating the incorrect axioms that cause these faults is a hard and time-consuming task. Addressing this issue, several techniques for a semi-automatic fault localization in ontologies have been proposed and extensively studied. One class of these approaches involve a human expert who provides answers to system-generated queries about the intended (correct) ontology in order to reduce the possible fault locations. To suggest as informative questions as possible, existing methods draw on various algorithmic optimizations as well as heuristics. However, these computations are often based on certain assumptions about the interacting expert. In this work, we demonstrate that these assumptions might not always be adequate and discuss consequences of their violations. In particular, we characterize a range of expert types with different query answering behavior and show that existing approaches are far from achieving optimal efficiency for all of them. In addition, we find that the cost metric adopted by state-of-the-art techniques might not always be realistic and that a change of metric has a decisive impact on the best choice of query answering strategy. As a remedy, we suggest a new – and simpler – type of expert question that leads to a stable fault localization performance for all analyzed expert types and effort metrics, and has numerous further advantages over existing techniques. Moreover, we present an algorithm which computes and optimizes this new query type in worst-case polynomial time and which is fully compatible with existing concepts (e.g., query selection heuristics) and infrastructure (e.g., debugging user interfaces) in the field. Comprehensive experiments on faulty real-world ontologies attest that the new querying method is substantially and statistically significantly superior to existing techniques both in terms of the number of necessary expert interactions and in terms of the query computation time. We find that relying on the new querying method can save an interacting expert more than 80% of their work, and can reduce the expert’s waiting time for the next query by more than three orders of magnitude. Beside these findings, we demonstrate that the efficiency of existing query-based tools can be significantly boosted by suggesting an appropriate query answering strategy to an expert; we also make recommendations in this regard. Further, we suggest optimal configurations of a debugger for situations where the new type of query is used. Remarkably, the proposed approach is not only applicable to ontologies, but to any monotonic knowledge representation language, and can even be adopted to solve general model-based diagnosis problems expressible using Reiter’s theory. 

One step at a time: An efficient approach to query-based ontology debugging

When ontologies reach a certain size and complexity, faults such as inconsistencies, unsatisfiable classes or wrong entailments are hardly avoidable. Locating the incorrect axioms that cause these faults is a hard and time-consuming task. Addressing this issue, several techniques for semi-automatic fault localization in ontologies have been proposed. Often, these approaches involve a human expert who provides answers to system-generated questions about the intended (correct) ontology in order to reduce the possible fault locations. To suggest as informative questions as possible, existing methods draw on various algorithmic optimizations as well as heuristics. However, these computations are often based on certain assumptions about the interacting user. 
In this work, we characterize and discuss different user types and show that existing approaches do not achieve optimal efficiency for all of them. As a remedy, we suggest a new type of expert question which aims at fitting the answering behavior of all analyzed experts. Moreover, we present an algorithm to optimize this new query type which is fully compatible with the (tried and tested) heuristics used in the field. Experiments on faulty real-world ontologies show the potential of the new querying method for minimizing the expert consultation time, independent of the expert type. Besides, the gained insights can inform the design of interactive debugging tools towards better meeting their users' needs.

A New Expert Questioning Approach to More Efficient Fault Localization in Ontologies.

When ontologies reach a certain size and complexity, faults such as inconsistencies or wrong entailments are hardly avoidable. Locating the faulty axioms that cause these faults is a hard and time-consuming task as, in real-world ontologies, there is often a large number of competing possible fault locations. Modelbased diagnosis is a paradigm that allows to reason about these different fault hypotheses based on the faulty ontology and a set of specifications about the intended (correct) ontology. In literature, several model-based approaches for ontology fault localization have been proposed. To relieve the user (domain expert) as much as possible of the mentally tough debugging task, these methods often guide the user towards the actual fault in a semi-automatic way. This is accomplished by an interactive dialog where the expert consecutively answers system-generated questions about the intended ontology in order to reduce the possible fault locations. To suggest as few and as informative questions as possible, these interactive methods draw on various algorithmic optimizations as well as heuristics. However, these computations are often based on certain assumptions about the interacting user and the metric to be optimized. In this work, we critically discuss these optimization criteria and suppositions about the user and argue that these might not always be fully realistic. As a result, we suggest an alternative, arguably more reasonable metric to measure the expert’s effort and show that existing approaches do not achieve optimal efficiency in terms of this metric. Moreover, we detect that the efficiency of existing approaches depends largely on the (answering) behavior of the interacting expert. As a remedy, we suggest a new (and simpler) notion of expert question that does not rely on any assumptions about the user’s way of answering and implies equal fault localization costs for different expert types. In experiments conducted on faulty real-world ontologies the novel querying method leads to fewer expert consultations in 66 % of the cases and reduces the computation time for the best next question by at least 80 % in all trials.

/pdf/how-you-ask-matters-a-simple-expert-questioning-approach-for-3qd2iynkk8.pdf

How You Ask Matters: A Simple Expert Questioning Approach for Efficient Ontology Fault Localization.

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On the Usefulness of Different Expert Question Types for Fault Localization in Ontologies

A New Expert Questioning Approach to More Efficient Fault Localization in Ontologies.

How You Ask Matters: A Simple Expert Questioning Approach for Efficient Ontology Fault Localization.