a happy time of year

Christmas for the last 6 years is the time when everyone else goes off to spend time with family and I hang about working late and enjoy getting stuff done without looming deadlines. This year, I'm still enjoying getting work done without deadlines - but I'm also in the crowd that's going off to see family. I can't imagine anything more exciting than wrapping up a bunch of toys and books for my gorgeous nephews and home-made Christmas cards.

I may not be the sweetest person year round ;) .. but I love my family and I love doing stuff for them.

Work is allowing me to do things for others also. Our business influence has been diverted by other happenings, and we've turned to the task of beefing up test coverage. This is an ancient but robust design with EJB-CMP persistence and a long user transaction scope. Tests have consisted of either developers constructing objects or cactus based tests. Not good - developers tend to create only sensible objects and container tests are enough extra work that the tests are not often run.

I've simplified with a wonderful library called XStream. At any point during a transaction I can export my entire state to XML and save into a test resources folder. Unit tests can now run - without dummy test data being setup, no dependencies on environment and outside the container - with a full and accurate representation of a user transaction!

The beautiful side effect is that support staff can do the same thing with client transactions in production :)