William Cameron | Beyond the Keyboard

Are you looking to refactor your existing codebase and don't have a clue where to start? Start with a block of code, a big function, a class, anything that you just look at and think WTF, where do I start!. Make it simpler, better, more modular. Apply today's best practices to the code, even if you don't think it will make much of a difference. Rename variables to be more meaningful, extract some of the methods or if statements into separate functions. And do the same thing the next day. And the day after that. Pretty soon, you'll begin to realize major rewards from minor efforts. And, you'll also reach a point where major structural changes will both be possible and reasonable - and, if you've done your job right, not all that hard. Slow and steady wins the software race.

The premise of TDD is to write tests that satisfy that a piece of functionality is working as expected. Be this a unit of code (unit test) or a higher level feature (acceptance test). A test should be written to fail. (Red) Simply enough code should be written to make this test pass (Green) Code should then be tidied up and optimised (Refactor). This is inline with the Kent Beck model of Red, Green, Refactor for Test Driven Development.

ATDD or Acceptance Test Driven Development is often referred to as BDD or Behaviour Driven Development. This is the practice of writing high level acceptance tests, understandable by business and customer level, in satisfying that a piece of work does what it is supposed too. Focusing on the behaviour of the system from the customer or users perspective, allows the project to progress from a functionality and behaviour perspective, so that once the system does what it's meant to do its complete. Acceptance tests will usually be ran at the project level, where it is possible to get an overview of the state of a project by running these, and see what percentage pass, determines what percentage of the project is complete.  Inline with these, developers may use separate Unit Tests inline with each acceptance test focusing on the units of code that make up an acceptance milestone.

Do you often wonder where to start with TDD?  Is it more hassle than its worth?  Well yes and no, and I guess its down to how passionate you are about your code. Check out http://www.phpunit.de  the industry standard for writing Unit Tests on your PHP code.

As the online and offline worlds converge, mobile commerce has the potential to eclipse desktop-based ecommerce and, perhaps, even replace a significant portion of traditional retail shopping. Mobile-driven online sales in the U.S. are expected to reach $2.12 billion in 2013 and explode to about $62.2 billion in the next three years, according to an eMarketer report . With such phenomenal growth, some change is bound to come. There are at least seven ways that mobile commerce is likely to change retail shopping and marketing. Online and multi-channel retailers should start preparing for these changes now. 1. Website Design Adapts Online sellers are already working to build responsive sites that change size and layout in response to the user’s device or device orientation. By next year, responsive design will become imperative. Merchants that have not optimized for smartphones and tablets could see an impact to the bottom line. 2. Marketplaces Become More Important Regardless of