Mike Bowler – Gargoyle Software

Extreme Quality with Test First Design

Faster and cheaper software development is the order of the day. The only way to continue to accelerate our development while keeping costs low is to increase our quality to levels far higher than we are currently used to. The longer it takes to identify and fix a defect, the more expensive it will be. The goal of extreme quality is to significantly reduce the number of defects introduced into the code and to identify as early as possible those defects that remain. We can no longer afford to leave defect identification to a group of dedicated testers at the end of the project.

The easier it is to test the code, the more likely we are to test it frequently and therefore the more likely we are to spot defects as soon as they are introduced. In this presentation, we will show how to design and implement easily testable code. We will also show how to automate the resulting tests using frameworks such as JUnit and HtmlUnit. Finally, we will demonstrate how to test some areas that are often considered untestable: Graphical user interfaces, multithreaded code and generated XML output.

Introduction to XSL Formatting Objects (XSL:FO)

XSL:FO is the solution to the problem of creating formatted page-based reports from XML data. Part of the XSL specification, XSL:FO is a standard markup that can be used to generate documents in formats such as PDF, RTF or PostScript.

In this presentation, we will introduce XSL:FO and show how it can be used to convert an XML document into PDF or other page-based printable formats. We will show how to define standard layout elements such as lists, tables and footnotes and will provide lots of code samples.

A basic understanding of XML and XSLT would be helpful.

Mike Bowler is the founder of Gargoyle Software, a Canadian consulting company specializing in Java development. Mike has been working almost exclusively with Java since 1996 and is the author of HtmlUnit, an open source testing tool. Email: mbowler@GargoyleSoftware.com

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