Myself and my team is taking over a DNN web application done by a software development vendor.
There are some issues like
1. redundant non-standard data / API to access to tab and configuration of a module, and
2. some other architecture related issues.
My goal is to remove things we don't need and steer the application back to DNN best practice. I also need to implement a work flow engine with DNN because at the moment the work flow process is "semi-hard-coded".
I am wondering if there are any design pattern / best practice material (especially to do with work flow) that we can follow to ease our pain and help us to prioritize work?
EDIT: the application is not designed with unit testing in mind, but I do not mind changing it as long as I can creating unit test, please help me with something about unit testing with DNN too.
Thanks in advance.
Best case would be to make a copy of the directory, clone the db, and put it separately so you can play around with it. First and foremost, upgrade to the newest version and see what happens with the bought and built modules. I had some problems with old modules that were central to operations not having or not being compatible with the newest dnn version. In all cases, a quick look on snowcovered found me alternates which turned out to be better anyway.
We're not a huge development team, but I found writing out test cases to ensure that functionality is not lost in the upgrade process helped immeasurably.
As I mentioned before, if it's homegrown code that you might not want to bring up to speed or even take over, there are a lot of modules out there that do a lot of cool stuff. Might be worth looking at a fresh install of DNN and migrating what you have to have and going from there.
Related
I've started my first experience in refactoring on huge system and writing unit tests for it, but I am just scared that I'm breaking the code without knowing it.
I studied the "the art of unit testing" and "working efficiently with legacy code" to find a solution, and my next plan is just stop refactoring for a while and write some integration testing(I have selected Fitnesse tool for integration testing purpose) to run them every time after I change some thing.
I am just wondering is there any other one with same experience? Do you think inetegration testing can be a good solution for this issue? Do you have any better idea?
I also checked this question (How can I check that I didn't break anything when refactoring?) but my situation is different with that, because there is no unit test available and I am here to write unit tests.
Integration testing is part of a good solution for refactoring. However some problems introduced by the refactoring will only show up when you have deployed the project.
A better idea would be to incorporate the integration testing into a continuous delivery strategy. This means you should have a clean and practical approach to build and deploy the project as often as possible to a near identical environment while refactoring it. The book Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment is a good resource. Here is one of the antipatterns it describes (Pages 7-9):
Antipattern: Deploying to a Production-like Environment Only after Development Is Complete
In this pattern, the first time the software is deployed to a
production-like environment (for example, staging) is once most of
the development work is done...
Once the application is deployed into staging, it is common for new
bugs to be found...
The remedy is to integrate the testing, deployment, and release
activities into the development process. Make them a normal and
ongoing part of development so that by the time you are ready to
release your system into production there is little to no risk,
because you have rehearsed it on many different occasions in a
progressively more production-like sequence of test environments. Make
sure everybody involved in the software delivery process, from the
build and release team to testers to developers, work together from
the start of the project.
At the end of the day, this is the problem of working with Legacy Code.
Integration Tests are your best bet, but to write those to correctly meet your needs, you would need to know the original intent of the original code, which often isn't as clear, because there are often hidden requirements.
There are no ideal solutions.
Although previous answers are very good, I'd like to add that unit tests are exactly for this. In our test project when we refactor each other components, its mandatory to run already existing unit tests prepared from initial developer + new ones before commit to the Version control. Besides - its a good approach to have smoke tests running on every check-in. An ofcourse - Integration, Regression etc. afterwards.
UPDATE
I'm in the exact same situation - chained to maintenance. Tools can vary greatly - depending of the needs. Starting from Web-, -Unit-Testing up to SOA- and Server-testing. If you provide more detailed info about your SUT I'll gladly try to help.
we have quite a lot of RPG-programs here, and we do a lot of automated testing, but we are not very good yet in combining those two. Are there good ways to do automated testing on RPG programs -- or on any other ILE programs for that matter?
I am aware of a project named RPGUnit, but that has it's last update in 2007. However, it seems it is still used, since RPG Next Gen is currently putting some work in including it.
What's you experience with those? Is there something else, that I am missing, like some great sofware tool google fails to find?
I'm interested in unit testing as well as integration testing of complete projects. Anything that integrates with tools like jenkins is welcome. If it involves IBM's Rational Developer or System i Navigator, that's okay, too.
We are in an early phase of creating new testing plans for our RPG development process, and I don't want it, to head in the wrong direction right from the start.
You probably already know how broad a subject 'testing' can be. IBM have a product called Rational Function Tester (I haven't used it) http://www-01.ibm.com/software/awdtools/tester/functional/ I myself use RPGUnit. No, it hasn't been updated recently but it still has all the pieces needed for testing subprocedures in the same way one would test Java methods.
Frankly, that's the easy part. The hard part is creating a test database and keeping it current enough to be representative of the production database. Rodin have some database tooling but I haven't the budget for those, so I roll my own more or less by hand. I use many SQL statements in a CL program to extract production data so I can maintain referential integrity. Then I use some more SQL to add my exceptional test cases - those relationships which aren't present in the production data but need to be tested for. Then I make a complete copy of the test database as a reference point. Then I run my test cases, which will update the test database. I've written a home grown CMPPFM utility that will allow me to compare the reference database against the now modified test database. This will show changes, but it still needs a lot of manual labour to review the comparisons to ensure that the proper rows got the proper updates. I haven't gone the extra mile to automate that yet. One big caveat is there are some columns you don't care about, like a change timestamp.
We went with RPGUNIT, and found it a good base to work from, but ended up extending it a lot to tie in with our Change Management system, and the way we work. I've written about the things we tried here: http://www.littlebluemonkey.com/blog/my-rpg-unit-test-journey
I am going to pick up a task that no one has ever attempted to try at my workplace. It is a CF app first written using CF 2.0 (Yes, 2.0!) 10 yrs ago with > 10 cfscheduler tasks.. We explored the idea of rewriting the app, but 10 yrs of work simply can't be rewrote in 2-3 months.
What steps shall one take to modernize the app into a maintainable, extendable state? The one that I keep hearing is "write tests", but how can I write tests when it wasn't even in MVC?
Any advice would be appreciated, thanks!
p.s. I should thank Allaire, Macromedia and Adobe for keeping CF so freaking backward compatible all the way back to 2.0!
btw, what's the most modern, maintainable state for a CF app without MVC framework? or should my end goal be ultimately refactoring it into a MVC app?? I can't image how many links I will break if I do... seems impossible... thought?
update: found 2 related Q's...
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/6395/how-do-you-dive-into-large-code-bases
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/29788/how-do-you-dive-into-a-big-ball-of-mud
I am not sure if you need to move the whole site to a MVC application. Recently I did helped with an site that was not MVC, that still had a library with the Models, Services and Assemblers in a clean and organized manor. It worked great, and we didn't need to do anything more than what was necessary.
That being said, my first step would be to organize the spaghetti code into their different purposes. It may be hard to properly create the models, but at the very least you could break out the services like functions from the pages. With that done, it should be a lot cleaner already.
Then, I would try to take the repeated code and put them into custom tags. It will make the code more reusable, and easier to read.
Good Luck!
Consider, whether a full fledged framework is really necessary. In its most basic form a framework is merely highly organized code. So if procedural, that is well organized, works leave it.
Keep in mind something like FW/1 as migration path can be better than say Coldbox if you don't need all the other stuff.
Lastly, consider this I was able to migrate a 4.5 almost 70% of the way to Coldbox (very simple and really more about directory and file organization versus IOC, plugins, modules, etc...) just using a few extra lines per file plus onMissingMethod functions.
Good Luck.
I had to deal with a similar situation for about two years at my last job, however, it wasn't quite as old as yours. I think I was dealing with code from 4.0 on. There's no silver bullet here, and you'll need to be careful that you don't get too caught up in re-factoring the code and costing your company tons of money in the process. If the app works as it is rewriting it would be a pretty big wast of money.
What I did was update small chunks at a time, I wouldn't even refactor whole templates at a time, just small portions of one at a time. If I saw a particular ugly loop, or nested if statements I'd try to clean it up the best I could. If the app can be broken down into smaller modules or areas of functionality and you have the extra time you can try to clean up the code a module at a time.
A good practice I heard from the Hearding Code podcast is create a testing harness template that would use a particular cfm page that has a known output that you can re-run to make sure that it still has the same output once you've done refactoring. Its not nearly as granular as a unit test, but its something and something is almost always better than nothing, right?
I suspect that the reason this app hasn't been touched for years is because for the most part it works. So the old adage "if it ain't broken don't fix it" probably applies; However, code can always be improved :)
The first thing I'd do is switch to Application.cfc and add some good error logging. That way you may find out about things that need to be fixed, and also if you do make changes you're know if they break anything else.
The next thing I'd do is before you change any code is use selenium to create some tests - it can be used as a FireFox plugin and will record what you do. It's really good for testing legacy apps without much work on your part.
Chances are that you won't have much if any protection from SQL injection attacks so you will want to add cfqueryparam to everything!!
After that I'd be looking for duplicated code - eliminating duplicate code is going to make maintenance easier.
Good luck!
Funnily enough, I'm currently involved in converting an old CF app into an MVC3 application.
Now this isn't CF2, it was updated as recently as a year ago so all of this may not apply at all to your scenario, apologies if this is the case.
The main thing I had to do consolidate the mixed up CFQuerys and their calls into logical units of code that I could then start porting in functionality either to C# or JavaScript.
Thankfully this was a very simple application, the majority of the logic was called on a database using the DWR Ajax library; that which wasn't was mostly consolidated in a functions.cfm file.
Obviously a lot of that behavior doesn't need to be replicated as packaging up the separate components of logic (such as they were) in the CF app did map quite neatly to the various Partial Views and Editor Templates that I envisaged in the MVC application.
After that, it was simply a case of, page by page, finding out which logic was called when, what it relied upon that then finally creating a series of UML class and sequence diagrams.
Honestly though, I think I gained the most ground when I simply hit File-New Project and started trying to replicate the behavior of the app from the top of index.cfm.
I would break logical parts of the app into CFC's
Pick a single view, look at the logic within. Move that out to a CFC and invoke it.
Keep doing that you will have something much easier to work with that can be plugged into an MVC later. Its almost no work to do this, just copy and paste sections of code and call them.
You can consider using object factory to layer your application. We have similar situation at work and we started refactoring by putting Lightwire DI framework.
First we migrated all the sql statement into gateways, then we started using services and take a lot of code out of the templates to the services.
The work is not finished yet but the application is looking better already.
For large, really complex applications I'd prefer ColdBox for a re-factor project. However, I just saw a presentation at the D2W Conference on F/W 1 (Framework One), a VERY simple ColdFusion MVC framework. Check out code from the presentation here.
It's 1 (one) CFC file and a set of conventions for organizing your code. I highly recommend evaluating it for your project.
I've been using MSTest so far for my unit-tests, and found that it would sometimes randomly break my builds for no reason. The builds would fail in VS but compile fine in MSBuild - with error like 'option strict does not allow IFoo to cast to type IFoo'. I believe I have finally fixed it, but after the bug coming back and struggling to make it go away again, and little help from MS, it left a bad taste in my mouth. I also noticed when looking at this forum and other blogs and such, that most people are using NUnit, xUnit, or MBUnit.. We are on VS2008 at work BTW.. So now I am looking to explore other options..
I'm working on moving our team to start doing TDD and real unit testing and have some training planned, but first would like to come up with a set of standard tools & best practices. To this end I've been looking online to come up with the right infrastructure for both a build server and dev machines...I was looking at the typemock website as I've heard great things about their mocking framework, and noticed that it seems like they promote MSTest, and even have some links of people moving TO MSTest from NUnit..
This is making me re-think my decision.. so I guess I'm asking - is anyone using MSTest as part of their TDD infrastructure? Any known limitiations it has, if I want to integrate with a build / CI server, or code coverage or any other kind of TDD tool I may need? I did search these forums and mostly find people comparing the 3rd party frameworks to eachother and not even giving MSTest much of a chance... Is there a good reason why.. ?
Thanks for the advice
EDIT: Thanks to the replies in this thread, I've confirmed MSTest works for my purposes and integreated gracefully with CI tools and build servers.
But does anyone have any experience with FinalBuilder?? This is the tool that I'd like us to use for the build scripts to prevent having to write a ton of XML compared to other build tools. Any limitiations here that I should be aware of before committing to MS Test?
I should also note - we are using VSS =(. I'm hoping we can ax this soon - hopefully as part of, maybe even the first step, of setting up all of this infrastructure.
At Safewhere we currently use MSTest for TDD, and it works out okay.
Personally, I love the IDE integration, but dislike the API. If it ever becomes possible to integrate xUnit.NET with the VS test runner, we will migrate very soon thereafter.
At least with TFS, MSTest works pretty well as part of our CI.
All in all I find that MSTest works adequately for me, but I don't cling to it.
If you are evaluating mock libraries, take a look at this comparison.
I've been using MS Test since VS 2008 came out, but I haven't managed to strong-arm anything like TDD or CI here at work, although I've messed with Cruise Control a little in an attempt to build a CI server on my local box.
In general I've found MS Test to be pretty decent for testing locally, but there are some pain points for institutional use.
First, MS Test adds quite a few things that probably don't belong in source control. The .VSMDI files are particularly annoying; just running MS Test creates anywhere from 1 to 5 of them and adds them to the solution file. Which means churn on your .SLN in source control, and churn of that sort is bad.
I understand the supposed point behind these extra files -- tracking test run history and such -- but I don't find them particularly useful for anything but a single developer. You should use your build service and CI for that sort of thing!
Second, you either must have Team Foundation Server to run your unit tests as part of CI, or you have to have a copy of Visual Studio installed on your build server if you use, for example, Cruise Control.NET. See this Stack Overflow question for details.
In general, there's nothing wrong with MS Test. But going CI will not be as smooth as it could be.
I have been using MSTest very successfully in our company. We are currently setting up standardised build processes within our company and so far, we have had good success with TeamCity. For Continuous integration, we use out the box TeamCity configurations. For the actual release builds, we set up large msbuild scripts that automate the entire process.
I really like mstest because of the IDE integration and also that all our devs automatically can use it without installing any 3rd party dependencies. I would not recommend switching just because of the problem you are experiencing. I have come full circle, where we went over to nunit and then came back again. These frameworks are all the same at the end of the day so pick the one that is easiest for most your devs to get access to and start using.
What I suspect your problem might be... sounds like an obscure problem I have had before where incorrect references of dll's (eg: adding explicit references (via browse) to projects in your solution, and not using the project reference) leads to out-of-date problems that only come up after clean checkouts or builds.
The other really suspect issue that I have found before is if you have some visual component or control that has a public property of some custom type that is being serialised in the forms .resx file. I typically need to flag them with an attribute that says SerializationVisibility.Hidden. This means that the IDE will not try to generate setters for the property value (which is typically some object graph). Just a thought. Could be way out.
I trust the tools and they don't really lie about there being a genuine problem. They only misrepresent them or report them as something completely obscure. It sounds to me like you have this. I suspect this because the error message doesn't make sense if all is in order, but it does make sense if some piece of code has loaded up an out of date or modified version of the dll at that point.
I have successfully deployed several FinalBuilder installations and the customers have been very happy with the outcome. I can highly recommend it.
I've recently used Django for a very small CMS-style website. I was so impressed with how quick and easy it was to develop a Django project, that I'm now considering using it for a significantly larger project.
However, before I get excited about the idea, I just wanted to run it by someone who actually has developed a very large Django website (with many features, and high traffic).
Baring in mind that recently I have used mostly C# Asp.Net - Are there any pitfalls I should know about?
As mentioned, it really depends on what "large" and "complex" actually mean. If you're planning on building another eBay, the answer is "probably not".
This question is asked a lot. Frankly, there are plenty of answers out there. This thread is pretty good. There was also a very well attended presentation at DjangoCon this year on Scaling Django. It's up to you to architect your site so that it scales, regardless of what technology you use.
My answer would be: If your site is going to outgrow Django (or any other framework, for that matter), it's huge success and you'll probably have enough capital to hire a gigantic team to rewrite the entire thing.
It's going to depend a lot on exactly what you mean by "large" and "complex".
As far as "complex", take a look at Pinax. Tons of features all built out of simple Django apps hooked together and it's still considered a framework that you would use as a start towards building a social software site. But I'm sure you can still come up with some version of "complex" that doesn't mesh well with Django's architecture.
Handling large amounts of traffic and large datasets is a different matter. Ultimately, if you get large enough, Django's not going to handle it. But really, neither will any framework. Jacob-Kaplan Moss (one of the django devs) has a great article outlining the history of web development that led up to where Django is. He makes a pretty strong case for why Django or any other framework can't excel at both rapid development and massive scalability but why it's still worth starting with one. Basically, no two high traffic sites are going to have the same scalability issues: they will all need a custom approach that's specific to the exact type of data and traffic they have to deal with. But since it's hard to predict exactly where those bottlenecks are going to be, it's a good idea to start with a rapid development framework and start replacing components when you encounter the need.
I found this quite interesting to read: http://softwaremaniacs.org/blog/2008/02/24/why-offline-crashed-en/
There are a lot of interesting articles in this blog, but, unfortunately, they're all in Russian.
Added: And since that post Ivan did write MySQL backend supporting master-slave replication: http://softwaremaniacs.org/soft/mysql_replicated/en/