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• Recommendations for a web-based help system

  - by ggkmath

  Hi Experts, I'm putting together a fairly large GUI. I'm a tech person, but more on the hardware side, not software. I'm wondering what software package would be best suited to enable me to generate a web-based help-system. Preferably it takes care of a lot of coding, allowing me to focus on the content. For example, the user would click on a link in the GUI when they have a question, that brings them to a web-based Help Guide, for example, providing an overview of how to use the GUI, perhaps a searchable index (key-word based index), table of contents, etc, for navigating through the Help Guide. My first thought was to program everything in XHTML using Dreamweaver, but my layout requirements are fairly modest (just figures and text, maybe a few equations), and I'd prefer not to spend a lot of time concentrating on the programming. Was wondering if any software existed that made generating web-based navigatable pages easy to create/publish. Again, I'm not really a programmer, so if there's something obvious out there, I'm probably not aware of it. Any advice much appreciated! Thanks in advance.

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• Right tool for the job(html5 vs silverlight)

  - by Jargo

  I have been tasked to develop a web based offer request application for bathrooms and I am asking opinions on which tool should I choose. I have narrowed options down to two (html5 and silverlight). Most of the application consists of basic UI elements that could be achieved with html4. However most challenging part is the design view for the bathroom. User first defines size of the bathroom by giving dimensions. When the dimensions are defined the application renders an empty bathroom floorplan and user can start dragging&dropping furniture on to it. Some furniture have rules where they can be dragged. For example sinks can only be dragged next to a wall. I know that this functionality can be achieved with silverlight but what about html5 ? I know that Canvas element can be used to draw graphics, but can it render the bathroom smoothly as user drags a piece furniture on it?

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• Most effective way to do daily standup meeting when a few people are remote

  - by Burhan Ali

  I am a software developer in a small team of seven. We are not an Agile (with a big 'A') team but are experimenting with some aspects of agile. One of these is the daily "standup" meeting. The difficulty here is that for two days of the week we have at least one person working from home so the full team isn't available in the same room. What is the best way to carry out a daily standup in this situation? Some facts that may be relevant: We all work in a single open plan room. We use Skype in our company. We don't have any video conferencing capability. We all work the same hours so there are no timezone complexities involved. The development manager is one of the people who works from home one day a week. Things we have tried: Conference call using Skype: This is tricky for those in the office because you can hear people speak in the room and then a split second later through the headset. This can e very distracting. Conference phone: Awful experience. Hard to get them to work and poor quality audio. Text-based updates using Skype. This is not as engaging and is no different than just firing off a status email in the morning. I have seen other questions about remote collaboration but they are mainly about completely remote teams and/or teams that span multiple time zones. We are not affected by either of these problems. What can we do to make our standup meetings better in these circumstances?

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• Dealing with coworkers when developing, need advice [closed]

  - by Yippie-Kai-Yay

  I developed our current project architecture and started developing it on my own (reaching something like, revision 40). We're developing a simple subway routing framework and my design seemed to be done extremely well - several main models, corresponding views, main logic and data structures were modeled "as they should be" and fully separated from rendering, algorithmic part was also implemented apart from the main models and had a minor number of intersection points. I would call that design scalable, customizable, easy-to-implement, interacting mostly based on the "black box interaction" and, well, very nice. Now, what was done: I started some implementations of the corresponding interfaces, ported some convenient libraries and wrote implementation stubs for some application parts. I had the document describing coding style and examples of that coding style usage (my own written code). I forced the usage of more or less modern C++ development techniques, including no-delete code (wrapped via smart pointers) and etc. I documented the purpose of concrete interface implementations and how they should be used. Unit tests (mostly, integration tests, because there wasn't a lot of "actual" code) and a set of mocks for all the core abstractions. I was absent for 12 days. What do we have now (the project was developed by 4 other members of the team): 3 different coding styles all over the project (I guess, two of them agreed to use the same style :), same applies to the naming of our abstractions (e.g CommonPathData.h, SubwaySchemeStructures.h), which are basically headers declaring some data structures. Absolute lack of documentation for the recently implemented parts. What I could recently call a single-purpose-abstraction now handles at least 2 different types of events, has tight coupling with other parts and so on. Half of the used interfaces now contain member variables (sic!). Raw pointer usage almost everywhere. Unit tests disabled, because "(Rev.57) They are unnecessary for this project". ... (that's probably not everything). Commit history shows that my design was interpreted as an overkill and people started combining it with personal bicycles and reimplemented wheels and then had problems integrating code chunks. Now - the project still does only a small amount of what it has to do, we have severe integration problems, I assume some memory leaks. Is there anything possible to do in this case? I do realize that all my efforts didn't have any benefit, but the deadline is pretty soon and we have to do something. Did someone have a similar situation? Basically I thought that a good (well, I did everything that I could) start for the project would probably lead to something nice, however, I understand that I'm wrong. Any advice would be appreciated, sorry for my bad english.

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• In a multidisciplicary team, how much should each member's skills overlap?

  - by spade78

  I've been working in embedded software development for this small startup and our team is pretty small: about 3-4 people. We're responsible for all engineering which involves an RF device controlled by an embedded microcontroller that connects to a PC host which runs some sort of data collection and analysis software. I have come to develop these two guidelines when I work with my colleagues: Define a clear separation of responsibilities and make sure each person's contribution to the final product doesn't overlap. Don't assume your colleagues know everything about their responsibilities. I assume there is some sort of technology that I will need to be competent at to properly interface with the work of my colleagues. The first point is pretty easy for us. I do firmware, one guy does the RF, another does the PC software, and the last does the DSP work. Nothing overlaps in terms of two people's work being mixed into the final product. For that to happen, one guy has to hand off work to another guy who will vet it and integrate it himself. The second point is the heart of my question. I've learned the hard way not to trust the knowledge of my colleagues absolutley no matter how many years experience they claim to have. At least not until they've demonstrated it to me a couple of times. So given that whenever I develop a piece of firmware, if it interfaces with some technology that I don't know then I'll try to learn it and develop a piece of test code that helps me understand what they're doing. That way if my piece of the product comes into conflict with another piece then I have some knowledge about possible causes. For example, the PC guy has started implementing his GUI's in .NET WPF (C#) and using LibUSBdotNET for USB access. So I've been learning C# and the .NET USB library that he uses and I build a little console app to help me understand how that USB library works. Now all this takes extra time and energy but I feel it's justified as it gives me a foothold to confront integration problems. Also I like learning this new stuff so I don't mind. On the other hand I can see how this can turn into a time synch for work that won't make it into the final product and may never turn into a problem. So how much experience/skills overlap do you expect in your teammates relative to your own skills? Does this issue go away as the teams get bigger and more diverse?

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• Any ideas about how to make Programming Techniques Class more interesting.

  - by Eedoh

  Hello. I already found similar question here on SO, but almost all the answers were more philosophical, then practical. I'd like You to share some of Your PRACTICAL ideas about how to make my course more interesting. It doesn't matter how much effort it takes from me. I even thought about trying to motivate them to pick some topic in the beginning of the course and to work on it as some kind of real, small, startup project that they could maybe financially exploit once it's finished. But I'm afraid that most of them will not get the project to the end, and that it could be boring to them working on one thing all year long. Also I thought about involving them in Torcs, but I'm afraid most of them wouldn't be up to the task. Btw, Torcs is Car Racing Simulation, but there's an API for developers so they can develop their own AI for the driver, and then race their cars against the other programmer's AI's. I'm not asking here for problem examples, as I asked a separate question about that. I need ideas about making my lectures more interesting and fun.

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• which style of member-access is preferable

  - by itwasntpete

  the purpose of oop using classes is to encapsulate members from the outer space. i always read that accessing members should be done by methods. for example: template<typename T> class foo_1 { T state_; public: // following below }; the most common doing that by my professor was to have a get and set method. // variant 1 T const& getState() { return state_; } void setState(T const& v) { state_ = v; } or like this: // variant 2 // in my opinion it is easier to read T const& state() { return state_; } void state(T const& v) { state_ = v; } assume the state_ is a variable, which is checked periodically and there is no need to ensure the value (state) is consistent. Is there any disadvantage of accessing the state by reference? for example: // variant 3 // do it by reference T& state() { return state_; } or even directly, if I declare the variable as public. template<typename T> class foo { public: // variant 4 T state; }; In variant 4 I could even ensure consistence by using c++11 atomic. So my question is, which one should I prefer?, Is there any coding standard which would decline one of these pattern? for some code see here

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• Scrum - how to carry over a partially complete User Story to the next Sprint without skewing the backlog

  - by Nick

  We're using Scrum and occasionally find that we can't quite finish a User Story in the sprint in which it was planned. In true Scrum style, we ship the software anyway and consider including the User Story in the next sprint during the next Sprint Planning session. Given that the User Story we are carrying over is partially complete, how do we estimate for it correctly in the next Sprint Planning session? We have considered: a) Adjusting the number of Story Points down to reflect just the work which remains to complete the User Story. Unfortunately this will mess up reporting the Product Backlog. b) Close the partially-completed User Story and raise a new one to implement the remainder of that feature, which will have fewer Story Points. This will affect our ability to retrospectively see what we didn't complete in that sprint and seems a bit time consuming. c) Not bother with either a or b and continue to guess during Sprint Planning saying things like "Well that User Story may be X story points, but I know it's 95% finished so I'm sure we can fit it in."

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• Switching from abstract class to interface

  - by nischayn22

  I have an abstract class which has all abstract methods except one which constructs objects of the subclasses. Now my mentor asked me to move this abstract class to an interface. Having an interface is no problem except with the method used to construct subclass objects. Where should this method go now? Also, I read somewhere that interfaces are more efficient than abstract classes. Is this true? Here's an example of my classes abstract class Animal { //many abstract methods getAnimalobject(some parameter) { return //appropriate subclass } } class Dog extends Animal {} class Elephant extends Animal {}

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• What could be the best way to generalize data from Facebook and Twitter?

  - by Sjaak van der Heide

  I am not sure if this is the best subsite to ask this question, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't fit on the normal or facebook SO page... I've been asked to make a general API for connecting to several Social Media platforms (at the moment Facebook and Twitter). I have already realised both of them seperately. Meaning I retrieve the data I need from both Facebook and Twitter and hold the data in it's own dataclass. In my case a list of FacebookTimelineItems and a list of TwitterTimelineItems. now the hard part is taking the parts that are used in both (username, id, message and such) and make 1 general class that is eventually passed on to who/whatever sent the call to my API. these are two pics of the data classes I have: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/703/facebookdata.png/ http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/204/twitterdata.png/ probably not 100% correct but it gives an idea what it looks like. Now I've been having several idea about how to go about and generalize the two, which is harder then I thought at first. Create an interface (TimelineItem) and let the other classes extend that one. this way I'll always be sure I have a class that contains at least the basic info I need. downside is that deserializing the JSON seems to be a nightmare. Use the two dataclasses I have and combine them into a new class afterwards, then pass that one back to whoever requested it. This would probably work but I get the idea it's not the best way to tackle this problem, and is pretty dodgy IF I get it working. Or, in case of the other two being nearly impossible. Keep the two seperated in the front end, and go sit in the corner crying because I've just figured out you can't lump together facebook and twitter... Note: I don't have to make the front end part (view), I just make sure the Model is nicely filled with data :) I hope I placed this in the right section, if I didn't I apologise and would like to know where I should go with my question. Thanks in advance for any replied/ideas/opinions on this.

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• Are first-class functions a substitute for the Strategy pattern?

  - by Prog

  The Strategy design pattern is often regarded as a substitute for first-class functions in languages that lack them. So for example say you wanted to pass functionality into an object. In Java you'd have to pass in the object another object which encapsulates the desired behavior. In a language such as Ruby, you'd just pass the functionality itself in the form of an annonymous function. However I was thinking about it and decided that maybe Strategy offers more than a plain annonymous function does. This is because an object can hold state that exists independently of the period when it's method runs. However an annonymous function by itself can only hold state that ceases to exist the moment the function finishes execution. So my question is: when using a language that features first-class functions, would you ever use the Strategy pattern (i.e. encapsulate the functionality you want to pass around in an explicit object), or would you always use an annonymous function? When would you decide to use Strategy when you can use a first-class function?

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• Authorization design-pattern / practice?

  - by Lawtonfogle

  On one end, you have users. On the other end, you have activities. I was wondering if there is a best practice to relate the two. The simplest way I can think of is to have every activity have a role, and assign every user every role they need. The problem is that this gets really messy in practice as soon as you go beyond a trivial system. A way I recently designed was to have users who have roles, and roles have privileges, and activities require some combinations of privileges. For the trivial case, this is more complex, but I think it will scale better. But after I implemented it, I felt like it was overkill for the system I had. Another option would be to have users, who have roles, and activities require you to have a certain role to perform with many activities sharing roles. A more complex variant of this would given activities many possible roles, which you only needed one of. And an even more complex variant would be to allow logical statements of role ownership to use an activity (i.e. Must have A and (B exclusive or C) and must not have D). I could continue to list more, but I think this already gives a picture. And many of these have trade offs. But in software design, there are oftentimes solutions, while perhaps not perfect in every possible case, are clearly top of the pack to an extent it isn't even considered opinion based (i.e. how to store passwords, plain text is worse, hashing better, hashing and salt even better, despite the increased complexity of each level) (i.e. 2, Smart UI designs for applications are bad, even if it is subjective as to what the best design is). So, is there a best practice for authorization design that is not purely opinion based/subjective?

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• Google is good or bad for programmer? [closed]

  - by Vikas

  Recently I was being interviewed by a company and faced one question. The interviewer asked me a question and at that time I didn't know the answer but if I had been asked about just 4 months ago, I could have answered it. The question was from new language that I learned just 4 months ago. But I just get overview of the language and just get started working on that. Whenever I face difficultly, I google it. That means we do not have to memorize the whole programming language book! So in that situation I felt that Google screwed my job! Not talking subjectively, Is it good to google all the time?

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• Online Poker Game Programng

  - by Eyal

  I am trying to write a massive multiplayer online (mmo) for a poker site, where one user can be on a Flash client and the other on say an iOS client (iPhone / iPad), and would like to know how can interaction between two users be visible on both clients. Do I use MSMQ? AJAX? Other? I need the messaging layer (client interaction messages) to scale up to 100K+ online users to begin with. In other words; What scaleable technology can I use to make game interactions between online users visible to all game participants? Thank you much in advance! Eyal

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• How do I print values of an array in Three Rows?

  - by Ramkumar

  I need this output.. 1 3 5 2 4 6 I want to use array function like array(1,2,3,4,5,6). If I edit this array like array(1,2,3), it means the output need to show like 1 2 3 The concept is maximum 3 column only. If we give array(1,2,3,4,5), it means the output should be 1 3 5 2 4 Suppose we will give array(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9), then it means output is 1 4 7 2 5 8 3 6 9 that is, maximum 3 column only. Depends upon the the given input, the rows will be created with 3 columns. Is this possible with PHP? I am doing small Research & Development in array functions. I think this is possible. Will you help me? For more info: * input: array(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15) * output: 1 6 11 2 7 12 3 8 13 4 9 14 5 10 15

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• Does a good programmer need to have good spatial sense?

  - by user297318

  Do you need to have good spatial sense to be a good programmer? I have next to nothing of it (I think it has to do with the differing vision of my eyes). I've already coded quite little things but wonder if this interferes with the ability to 'imagine' the assembly of the code in case of a more complex program? Sorry for my english, I'm Austrian and not so used to write in English.. Thanks for your ansers..

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• Web Services and code lists

  - by 0x0me

  Our team heavily discuss the issues how to handle code list in a web service definition. The design goal is to describe a provider API to query a system using various values. Some of them are catalogs resp. code lists. A catalog or code list is a set of key value pairs. There are different systems (at least 3) maintaining possibly different code lists. Each system should implement the provider API, whereas each system might have different code list for the same business entity eg. think of colors. One system know [(1,'red'),(2,'green')] and another one knows [(1,'lightgreen'),(2,'darkgreen'),(3,'red')] etc. The access to the different provider API implementations will be encapsulated by a query service, but there is already one candidate which might use at least one provider API directly. The current options to design the API discussed are: use an abstract code list in the interface definition: the web service interface defines a well known set of code list which are expected to be used for querying and returning data. Each API provider implementation has to mapped the request and response values from those abstract codelist to the system specific one. let the query component handle the code list: the encapsulating query service knows the code list set of each provider API implementation and takes care of mapping the input and output to the system specific code lists of the queried system. do not use code lists in the query definition at all: Just query code lists by a plain string and let the provider API implementation figure out the right value. This might lead to a loose of information and possibly many false positives, due to the fact that the input string could not be canonical mapped to a code list value (eg. green - lightgreen or green - darkgreen or both) What are your experiences resp. solutions to such a problem? Could you give any recommendation?

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• What is meant by, "A user shouldn't decide whether it is an Admin or not. The Privileges or Security system should."

  - by GlenPeterson

  The example used in the question pass bare minimum data to a function touches on the best way to determine whether the user is an administrator or not. One common answer was: user.isAdmin() This prompted a comment which was repeated several times and up-voted many times: A user shouldn't decide whether it is an Admin or not. The Privileges or Security system should. Something being tightly coupled to a class doesn't mean it is a good idea to make it part of that class. I replied, The user isn't deciding anything. The User object/table stores data about each user. Actual users don't get to change everything about themselves. But this was not productive. Clearly there is an underlying difference of perspective which is making communication difficult. Can someone explain to me why user.isAdmin() is bad, and paint a brief sketch of what it looks like done "right"? Really, I fail to see the advantage of separating security from the system that it protects. Any security text will say that security needs to be designed into a system from the beginning and considered at every stage of development, deployment, maintenance, and even end-of-life. It is not something that can be bolted on the side. But 17 up-votes so far on this comment says that I'm missing something important.

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• How are generics implemented?

  - by greenoldman

  This is the question from compiler internals perspective. I am interested in generics, not templates (C++), so I marked the question with C#. Not Java, because AFAIK the generics in both languages differ in implementations. When I look at languages w/o generics it is pretty straightforward, you can validate the class definition, add it to hierarchy and that's it. But what to do with generic class, and more importantly how handle references to it? How to make sure that static fields are singular per instantiations (i.e. each time generic parameters are resolved). Let's say I see a call: var x = new Foo<Bar>(); Do I add new Foo_Bar class to hierarchy? Update: So far I found only 2 relevant posts, however even they don't go into much details in sense "how to do it by yourself": http://www.jprl.com/Blog/archive/development/2007/Aug-31.html http://www.artima.com/intv/generics2.html

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• Avoiding duplicate bug reports

  - by Jaakko Seppälä

  I use Linux and other open source software in my home. As I'm not a professional coder, I usually report bugs to developers as my skills are not enough to solve problems on my own. What kind of things you want me to check before I send a bug report? I mean, once I thought I found a bug in Gedit and I couldn't find similar bug in Bugzilla. But after I sent the report, some developer said that the bug is already in Bugzilla as the bug was in GTK+, not in Gedit. Sometimes it might be hard for an amateur to guess whether some previously known bug would solve the issue I found.

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• good literature for teaching object oriented thinking in C [closed]

  - by Dipan Mehta

  Quite often C is the primary platform for the development. And when things are large scale, I have seen partitioning of the system as different objects is quite a natural thing. Some or many of the object orientated analysis and design principles are used here very well. This is not a debate question about whether or not C is a good candidate for object oriented programming or not. This is also NOT a question how to do OO in C. You can refer to this question and there are probably many such citations. As far as I am concerned, I have learned some of this things while working with many open source and commercial projects. (libjpeg, ffmpeg, Gstreamer which is based on GObject). I can probably extend a few references that explains some of these concepts such as - 1. Event Helix article, 2. Linux Mag article 3. one of my answers which links Schreiner's reference. Unfortunately, when we induct younger folks, it seems too hard to make them learn all of it the hard way. Usually, when we say it's C, a general reaction is to throw away all of the "Object thinking". Looking for help extending above references from those who have been in the similar areas of work. Are there any good formal literature that explains how Object thinking can be made to use while you are working in C? I have seen tons of book on general "object oriented paradigms" but they all focus on advanced languages mostly not in C. You see most C books - but most focus only on the syntax and the obfuscated corners of C and that's it. There are hardly ANY good reference, specially books or any systematic (I mean formal) literature on how to apply OO in C. This is very surprising given that so many large scale open source projects use C which are truly using this very well; but we hardly see any good formal literature on this subject.

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• Optimal Database design regarding functionality of letting user share posts by other users

  - by codecool

  I want to implement functionality which let user share posts by other users similar to what Facebook and Google+ share button and twitter retweet. There are 2 choices: 1) I create duplicate copy of the post and have a column which keeps track of the original post id and makes clear this is a shared post. 2) I have a separate table shared post where I save the post id which is a foreign key to post id in post table. Talking in terms of programming basically I keep pointer to the original post in a separate table and when need to get post posted by user and also shared ones I do a left join on post and shared post table Post(post_id(PK), post_content, posted_by) SharedPost(post_id(FK to Post.post_id), sharing_user, sharedfrom(in case someone shares from non owners profile)) I am in favour of second choice but wanted to know the advice of experts out there? One thing more posts on my webapp will be more on the lines of facebook size not tweet size.

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• How many developers actually have private offices?

  - by Morgan Herlocker

  So I know everyone here is all about private offices, how many developers actually have them. I am sort of half skeptical. I can believe that lead developers have them, but thats normally just one person in your average office. If it would not be to much to ask: Do you work in a totally awesome office or a nasty old cube? (or somewhere in between) What's your relative rank in the office? (junior, programmer II, senior, lead, etc.) are you doing internal software, or are you in a software-centric environment? (the general thought seems to be that internal developers get cubes while others live in "Joel-Spolsky-Programmer-Candyland")

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• What is the right level of granularity for code commenting?

  - by Nick

  Commenting in code I believe is very important but recently I've been reviewing code that has left me wondering particular this one. //due to lack of confidence with web programming leaving this note in for now What is the right level of granularity for code commenting? EDIT: Obviously the above comment is shocking hence why I'm asking the question. I've recently noticed the inline comments in the code at my work place annoying. Instead of getting angry I want discovery the acceptable level of granularity for code commenting in the community.

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• Mocking concrete class - Not recommended

  - by Mik378

  I've just read an excerpt of "Growing Object-Oriented Software" book which explains some reasons why mocking concrete class is not recommended. Here some sample code of a unit-test for the MusicCentre class: public class MusicCentreTest { @Test public void startsCdPlayerAtTimeRequested() { final MutableTime scheduledTime = new MutableTime(); CdPlayer player = new CdPlayer() { @Override public void scheduleToStartAt(Time startTime) { scheduledTime.set(startTime); } } MusicCentre centre = new MusicCentre(player); centre.startMediaAt(LATER); assertEquals(LATER, scheduledTime.get()); } } And his first explanation: The problem with this approach is that it leaves the relationship between the objects implicit. I hope we've made clear by now that the intention of Test-Driven Development with Mock Objects is to discover relationships between objects. If I subclass, there's nothing in the domain code to make such a relationship visible, just methods on an object. This makes it harder to see if the service that supports this relationship might be relevant elsewhere and I'll have to do the analysis again next time I work with the class. I can't figure out exactly what he means when he says: This makes it harder to see if the service that supports this relationship might be relevant elsewhere and I'll have to do the analysis again next time I work with the class. I understand that the service corresponds to MusicCentre's method called startMediaAt. What does he mean by "elsewhere"? The complete excerpt is here: http://www.mockobjects.com/2007/04/test-smell-mocking-concrete-classes.html

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