Mario Cervera's Blog

Mario Cervera's Blog

Common test smells

Sep 21, 20216 min read

Most of us are familiar with the problems exhibited by the systems that contain design smells (understanding the term “smell” as defined in Martin Fowler’s book Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code). Some of these problems are: The sys...

Common test smells

Code Structure vs Behavior in TDD

Aug 12, 20216 min read

Recently, I wrote a post about my talk at the 1st International Conference on Test-Driven Development (TDD). The post covers the part where I discuss about the notion of robust tests and how unit size impacts robustness. In that post, I leave one que...

Code Structure vs Behavior in TDD

My Talk at the 1st International Conference on TDD

Jul 28, 20215 min read

Last July 10th, we could witness the first International Conference on Test-Driven Development (TDD). It was a historic event. The lineup included big names such as GeePaw Hill and one of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto: James Greenin...

My Talk at the 1st International Conference on TDD

Refactoring long lists of parameters

Feb 10, 20218 min read

There seems to be no agreement in the software engineering community about how many parameters are too many for a function. This should come to no surprise. The ideal number of parameters for a function need not be the same as the ideal number of par...

Refactoring long lists of parameters

Are design patterns still relevant?

Dec 29, 202010 min read

Design patterns became popular during the 90s, when the “Gang of Four (GoF)” (Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides) wrote the well-known book: "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" This book is one...

Are design patterns still relevant?

Big O notation and the Bachmann-Landau family

Nov 28, 20208 min read

Most of us, software engineers, are familiar with (or, at least, have heard of) the well-known "Big O" notation (O-notation for short). The reasons are diverse. O-notation is a concept that arises frequently in technical interviews, so it is likely t...

Big O notation and the Bachmann-Landau family