Exploration Through Example

Example-driven development, Agile testing, context-driven testing, Agile programming, Ruby, and other things of interest to Brian Marick

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Fri, 26 Aug 2005

Logging and children

A program should be able to answer the two questions parents so often ask young children:

• All right, which of you [subsystems] did it?

• What on earth were you thinking?
  (What chain of events led to the wrong action? What relevant "facts" were believed at that moment?)

Logging is an important tool toward that end. I think it's underused and too often misused. I wrote some patterns for using logging for PLoP 2000 (pdf). Pretty mediocre. Who's written what I should have?

The TextTest people advocate using logging to capture the expected results of a business-facing test. I like when idea working on ugly legacy code.

## Posted at 08:57 in category /coding [permalink] [top]