SURGE: Effective Automated Testing in a Microservice World – Part 1

Gerry Hernandez, Accusoft Senior Software Engineer Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a buzzword to some, yet a way of life to others. Some say Behavior-Driven Development, or BDD, is TDD done right. Cucumber made BDD popular, promising wonderful features such as: Writing specifications in Gherkin, an English-like grammar, rather than code Allowing anyone, even non-developers, to read and write tests since they’re English-like Reusing code by reusing Gherkin statements Driving tests with data Everyone is happy.…

A Practice in Perforce to Git Migration (for Windows)

There may be several reasons to move from one version control system (VCS) to another, but our team’s primary motivations for moving out of Perforce and into Git were to: Move toward a better continuous integration model Gain greater flexibility for things like feature toggling and swarming Have a system that is easier to set up and get going quickly Make it easier when team members are distributed The biggest challenges for our team in…

How to Migrate From Monolithic Applications to a Microservices Architecture: Part 4

Logging for monitoring and maintenance When making the move from a single-process application to a large array of microservices, monitoring can become simultaneously more difficult and immensely important. As with anything in engineering, there are numerous trade-offs to be made with how to monitor and inspect your application stack both during development and testing and out in the real world. Logs only work if you look at them Developers who have worked primarily in a…

Use Imaging Tools to Give EMR Apps X-Ray Vision

As an electronic medical record (EMR) application developer, you face a number of complex issues, including interoperability, optimizing the user interface, maintaining data integrity, and ensuring data privacy and security. Faithful display of images is one of the more complex requirements, even when diagnostic quality isn’t required. There are many sizes, resolutions, bit depths, and file formats that may need to be supported. Software to compress, manipulate, and display medical images must be compatible, reliable,…