Abstract

A new method for Automated Software Testing is presented as an alternative to Unit Testing. The new method retains the benefit of Unit Testing, which is Defect Localization, but eliminates white-box testing and mocking, thus greatly lessening the effort of writing and maintaining tests.

This was written on 2021-11-26 but it is retro-dated so as to not appear among my recent posts, and thus avoid embarrassing certain unnamed entities. It is written in past tense even though a few paragraphs down the page it begins describing my current experience, because in the near future I intend this to become my past experience.

In 2015 I decided to leave Greece and its destroyed economy, and to go live and work elsewhere in Europe. I started an international job search, and within a couple of months I had a few offers to choose from. I picked the one from a company called Topdesk, in the nice little university town of Delft, in The Netherlands, mainly because of tax benefits available to expats in that country, but also, and in no small part, because The Netherlands has the reputation of being one of the most foreigner-friendly countries in Europe. The Netherlands achieves this reputation in a number of ways, one of which is the fact that the Dutch rank number one in the world (1) in English-as-a-foreign language proficiency, making it possible to live in The Netherlands without ever having to learn Dutch.

(Useful pre-reading: About these papers)

This assumes that you have previously established a wi-fi connection, so windows has created what it calls a “profile”.

In short, the commands are:

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netsh wlan connect ssid=<ssid> name=<name>

and

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netsh wlan disconnect

To obtain ssid and name, use:

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netsh wlan show profile

This should display all existing profile names, and by default, the <name> is the same as the <ssid>.

If you are a recruiter wishing to contact me with regards to some job opportunity, please read this.

This article attempts to shed some light on what a microservice really is; it is meant as support material for other posts of mine that discuss microservices, mainly The Stateful Microservice.

What is a microservice?

If you go looking for information on what a microservice is, you will find many different descriptions, exhibiting considerable difference of opinion. Most claims about microservices are non-technical rather than technical, for example the allegedly “independent” software development style around microservices, or some alleged organization of microservices “around business capabilities”. Even when the claims do stick within the technical realm, they are often unwarranted; for example, I have seen statements to the effect that a microservice is supposed to live in its very own source code repository, that microservices must communicate with each other via nothing but REST, etc. My favorite one is that they must necessarily be stateless. This paper is a first step in dispelling the statelessness myth.

I did a quick search for the term and did not find anything concrete, so I thought I might as well publicly document my thoughts.