Product Status Peek – 2011

Eli Lopian    Marketing, Product, Release, Unit Tests    

We are starting the year with some great product advances.

Typemock Isolator++

We have released version 1.1, with many bug fixes and 2 major features:

1. Continuing with our beliefs, now there is no need to change the production code at all!

2. There is a new api to fake out and ref arguments

3. No, we haven’t completed our port to GCC yet

More information here

Typemock Isolator

We have been working hard on fixing bugs and adding integrations to many other tools, keep an eye out for the upcoming release.

Typemock Test Lint

We added more rules that handle interaction based testing and boosted the performance, keep an eye out for this release.

Typemock TeamMate

We fixed some Server Connectivity issues and boosted the performance on this one too, expect the release soon.

And last but not least
Here is a peek screenshot straight from the oven of our labs:

Thanks Roy

Eli Lopian    Management for Geeks    

I would like to thank Roy for the amazing time we had together, Roy has been working at Typemock for 3 years now and it has been a blast! Good times, hearty discussions and we managed to overcome great challenges together.
Now Roy is going on another journey and is focusing on Ruby.

Thanks a lot Roy for the great time, we already have plans to do some stuff together, and I am sure we will continue to do so. Good luck with your new gig.

Typemock starts 2011 in a new location

Eli Lopian    Fun    

This is really a great way to start 2011, we moved to our new offices, after outgrowing our older space, we moved to a great location with a view to the sea, in the center of town. The place is amazing and has managed to both keep our open-space, team-driven values with the correct closed areas to make sure the team can focus. Funnily enough, the interior design, felt much like our agile process. Here are some pictures, starting from the gory details of construction.

A huge thanks to the great team who made this happen

Agile Demos Smells

Eli Lopian    Agile, Code Integrity    

There are many things that I look at when I see a demo, one of thing that fascinates me are demo smells. These are automatic actions that developers do when the demo doesn’t quite go well that underlay conceptual problems.

For example when seeing a demo at the end of an iteration, does the developer have some script that he keeps running from time to time, does the developer delete files when something wrong happens, is the process monitor running. Looking at these actions gives great insight into the potential architectural bugs.

If there is a batch file, there might be some kind of environment problem, if files are being deleted there might be some integrity problem, if the process monitor is up there might be a process synchronization problem.

It is normally cheaper in the long run to solve the root problems and save time when running the application then to keep performing these automatic actions.

Ask about these actions, you will get surprising answers! Then see what can be done to remove these actions.

I want loud disputes in our meetings

Eli Lopian    Management for Geeks    

We had a really high tone dispute in a few meetings about our coming breakthrough product. It was on the verge of getting hostile, both sides where trying to make a point but no one was really listening and the same questions where being asked over again with the same answers just with higher and higher tones. It was getting frustrating, and this had been going on for 3 meetings.

I believe that conflicts in discussions are vital to keep our minds open and are very productive and we normally get to great ideas, but in this case the conflict was not going anywhere. Trying to get others to talk about their views and trying to talk about it from different viewpoints didn’t help. We adjourned the meeting with bad feelings.

During the days that followed, each team member approached me alone and talked about how non effective the meetings were that they didn’t feel good about the situation. I asked them: So what are you going to do about it? and got a range of answers in the spirit of “I will make sure not to do it any more”.

After some time I talked to them one on one and told them that I had enough information to make the decision and explained the solution and how it fits our major concerns.

In the next meeting, I explained the solution once again to everyone. Everyone nodded. I hope I showed them:

• How to take responsibility and make a choice.
• How to make a choice with clarity even though there is no certainty.
• That it is possible to fix the frustrating behavior by talking to the other party in private, and not just promise to “not to shout in the future”
• How to solve differences outside the meetings so that decisions are easier to make.

I then thanked the team for taking a side, for showing that they cared. I want the team to continue to be passionate about what we do and to continue to fight if needed, this will help us reach a much better solutions. 

Thanks team! Great fight!

Easy unit testing in C++, Webinar

Eli Lopian    Product, Release, Unit Tests    

I am very excited about Isolator++. Roy has written a post on our first encounter with unit testing C++ and the difficulties we found many years ago. There are many issues in C++ that render ‘testable design’ to be ‘bad design’, for example calling virtual methods constructors in a big no no in C++, but testable design means having those methods virtual methods. So trying to convince developers to make their code testable has led to a lot of resistance.

But our dream of unit testing C++ is coming true with Isolator++, and you are invited to hear Roy Osherove talk about Unit testing C++.

Mark the date: Thursday, October 21st, 2010

More information here (we are giving out free Isolator++ licenses!)

How we doubled our visitors

Eli Lopian    Product, Release, Unit Tests    

Simple, we created a great compelling product!

We have doubled our visitors and downloads since releasing Isolator++! This is really exciting. It is great to welcome C++ developers to the unit testing world and to make it easy to unit test too.

We have carefully crafted Isolator++ for C++ developers with all our knowledge from the .NET world, on how to help us developers focus on creating productive code and automate all of the plumbing and wiring. This makes writing unit tests easy and thus help us become software craftsmen.

Some of our community tweets, thanks.

@unclebobmartin: http://bit.ly/cB41Hz Wow, a mocking framework for C++. What a brave new world.

@dr_dobbs: Typemock Launches Isolator ++ http://twb.io/9×1g9e

@KentBeck: Isolator++ looks interesting for our unit-testing C++ brethren http://bit.ly/c62UXE

@testertools: Typemock Launches Isolator ++ – First C++ Easy Unit Testing Solution: Typemock,  the leading provider and pioneer… http://bit.ly/d0tm2d

@MrClyfar: For C++ devs, this could be HUGE! http://www.elilopian.com/2010/10/06/new-unit-testing-c-with-typemock/

Web Site bug issue now solved

Eli Lopian    Marketing, Unit Tests    

Just came back from our Isolator++ release brunch, thanks team, it’s a pleasure to celebrate this release with you, after all the hard work and challenges that we had to overcome. and what a great release! We have managed to beat our own goals.

But here comes the embarrassing part, a small bug slipped though our tests. All the images of the Isolator++ Product Page where missing from IE Browsers and looked like this:

Ouch!! after so many hours of creating Isolator++, Testing it, Sitting with the graphic designers and articulating our values, and we can’t see anything

Some of you told us about this problem as soon as they saw it (thanks guys) but only this morning did we fix the page.

Looks better and now you can download and try out the tool.

*New* Unit Testing C++ with Typemock

Eli Lopian    Unit Tests    

Today is a really special day for us. We are releasing our first tool to help C++ developers unit test there code – Isolator++ . Up till now, we have been focused on the .NET developers and have a suite of tools to help developers unit test in an easy-correct-and-effective way. We are now breaking the own limits and are aimed at helping more developers unit test.

Unit testing is considered extremely difficult for C/C++ developers, and these applications are the ones written for smart-phones, medical, avionics, automobile and other life-critical and mission critical devices.

Our first version will make unit testing alot easier. We currently support Windows platforms and are planning on supporting other platforms rapidly. Our great team of developers have managed to pour all of our unit-testing knowledge into this solution.

Isolator++ Main Features

See more features here

• Introducing Short and Simple but Powerful API:
  On one hand our API’s can powerful enough to FAKE any function on the other hand we understand that developers want to ignore complete components, and this can be done in one statement.
• Robust- Low Maintenance
  Due to the loose default nature of Isolator++ changes in the production code have a lower impact on the tests, meaning that adding or removing calls to a faked class will not break the test. This leads to lower maintenance along with the readable API makes failing tests easier to fix
• examples:
  Fake complete classed (methods can be non-virtual)
  Fake call hierarchies (complete call-chains)
  Fake static methods and globals
  Fake future object.

Free Isolator++ Download Here

CrowdMarketing – Crowd driven messaging

Eli Lopian    Marketing, Unit Tests    

We have all heard of crowdsourcing, and that crowdsourcing marketing is doomed to fail. So it is not often that one our our users manages to articulate our values in such a clear and concise way:

@leypascua: It’s amazing how TypeMock enables you to take advantage of trade-offs in code without sacrificing quality.

Thanks leypascua