Matthias Noback has a new post today, part one in a series, looking at moving away from assertion-centric testing and more towards descriptive unit tests.

In the introduction article of this series I quickly mentioned that I think unit testing often focuses too much on assertions. [...] I used to preach these things myself too (yes, "development with tests" often comes with a lot of preaching). But now I don't follow these rules anymore. I will shortly explain my reasons. But before I do, let's take a step back and consider something that is known as the Test framework in a tweet, by Mathias Verraes.

He breaks up the rest of the article into three sections, each with a few paragraphs of description and code where appropriate:

• Something is the case, or not
• Only one assertion for each test?
• Write assertions first and then work towards them?

He talks about the idea of "Arrange Act Assert" and makes some recommendations as to how to be more descriptive in your tests and make them easier to read and follow in the future.

Sameer Borate has shared some examples of how to generate some meaningful statistics about the contents of your database in a new post to his site today.

Descriptive statistics can be quite useful for simple analysis of records in a database. For example, to calculate average numbers of sales or products for a particular duration, or the Variance of sales for a month etc. We can easily calculate standard descriptive statistic measures in MySQL such as MEAN, SUM, STANDARD DEVIATION, VARIANCE, MIN and MAX using built-in functions.

He includes both the SQL and a bit of PHP code showing how to get these statistics (based on a simple data set of student scores). The PHP is required to more correctly evaluate the median and mode values as it's easier to evaluate those in PHP.

Brandon Savage has his own response to the "comments are harmful" post over on the PHP in Action blog:

There's a lot of good advice, especially about writing clean code. But the article fails to address a good number of really critical details and to some degree misses the point of Eli's article.

He mentions these points - the value of writing comments before hand, the usefulness of descriptive comments, how they can be used as a todo pointing to future development and using them to share the knowledge and let other people in on what you're thinking.