text:
Testing on the Toilet: Truth: a fluent assertion framework
Friday, December 19, 2014 18:28 PM
by Dori Reuveni and Kurt Alfred Kluever
This article was adapted from a Google Testing on the Toilet (TotT) episode. You can download a printer-friendly version of this TotT episode and post it in your office.
As engineers, we spend most of our time reading existing code, rather than writing new code. Therefore, we must make sure we always write clean, readable code. The same goes for our tests; we need a way to clearly express our test assertions.
Truth is an open source, fluent testing framework for Java designed to make your test assertions and failure messages more readable. The fluent API makes reading (and writing) test assertions much more natural, prose-like, and discoverable in your IDE via autocomplete. For example, compare how the following assertion reads with JUnit vs. Truth:
assertEquals("March", monthMap.get(3)); // JUnitBoth statements are asserting the same thing, but the assertion written with Truth can be easily read from left to right, while the JUnit example requires "mental backtracking".
assertThat(monthMap).containsEntry(3, "March"); // Truth
Another benefit of Truth over JUnit is the addition of useful default failure messages. For example:
ImmutableSet<String> colors = ImmutableSet.of("red", "green", "blue", "yellow");In this example, both assertions will fail, but JUnit will not provide a useful failure message. However, Truth will provide a clear and concise failure message:
assertTrue(colors.contains("orange")); // JUnit
assertThat(colors).contains("orange"); // Truth
AssertionError: <[red, green, blue, yellow]> should have contained <orange>
Truth already supports specialized assertions for most of the common JDK types (Objects, primitives, arrays, Strings, Classes, Comparables, Iterables, Collections, Lists, Sets, Maps, etc.), as well as some Guava types (Optionals). Additional support for other popular types is planned as well (Throwables, Iterators, Multimaps, UnsignedIntegers, UnsignedLongs, etc.).
Truth is also user-extensible: you can easily write a Truth subject to make fluent assertions about your own custom types. By creating your own custom subject, both your assertion API and your failure messages can be domain-specific.
Truth's goal is not to replace JUnit assertions, but to improve the readability of complex assertions and their failure messages. JUnit assertions and Truth assertions can (and often do) live side by side in tests.
To get started with Truth, check out http://google.github.io/truth/
GTAC 2014 Wrap-up
Friday, December 05, 2014 00:26 AM
by Anthony Vallone on behalf of the GTAC Committee
On October 28th and 29th, GTAC 2014, the eighth GTAC (Google Test Automation Conference), was held at the beautiful Google Kirkland office. The conference was completely packed with presenters and attendees from all over the world (Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, many European countries, India, Israel, Korea, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, Russia, Taiwan, and many US states), bringing with them a huge diversity of experiences.
Speakers from numerous companies and universities (Adobe, American Express, Comcast, Dropbox, Facebook, FINRA, Google, HP, Medidata Solutions, Mozilla, Netflix, Orange, and University of Waterloo) spoke on a variety of interesting and cutting edge test automation topics.
All of the slides and video recordings are now available on the GTAC site. Photos will be available soon as well.
This was our most popular GTAC to date, with over 1,500 applicants and almost 200 of those for speaking. About 250 people filled our venue to capacity, and the live stream had a peak of about 400 concurrent viewers with 4,700 playbacks during the event. And, there was plenty of interesting Twitter and Google+ activity during the event.
Our goal in hosting GTAC is to make the conference highly relevant and useful for, not only attendees, but the larger test engineering community as a whole. Our post-conference survey shows that we are close to achieving that goal:
If you have any suggestions on how we can improve, please comment on this post.
Thank you to all the speakers, attendees, and online viewers who made this a special event once again. To receive announcements about the next GTAC, subscribe to the Google Testing Blog.
Protractor: Angular testing made easy
Sunday, November 30, 2014 17:50 PM
By Hank Duan, Julie Ralph, and Arif Sukoco in Seattle
Have you worked with WebDriver but been frustrated with all the waits needed for WebDriver to sync with the website, causing flakes and prolonged test times? If you are working with AngularJS apps, then Protractor is the right tool for you.
Protractor (protractortest.org) is an end-to-end test framework specifically for AngularJS apps. It was built by a team in Google and released to open source. Protractor is built on top of WebDriverJS and includes important improvements tailored for AngularJS apps. Here are some of Protractor's key benefits:
- You don't need to add waits or sleeps to your test. Protractor can communicate with your AngularJS app automatically and execute the next step in your test the moment the webpage finishes pending tasks, so you don't have to worry about waiting for your test and webpage to sync.
- It supports Angular-specific locator strategies (e.g., binding, model, repeater) as well as native WebDriver locator strategies (e.g., ID, CSS selector, XPath). This allows you to test Angular-specific elements without any setup effort on your part.
- It is easy to set up page objects. Protractor does not execute WebDriver commands until an action is needed (e.g., get, sendKeys, click). This way you can set up page objects so tests can manipulate page elements without touching the HTML.
- It uses Jasmine, the framework you use to write AngularJS unit tests, and Javascript, the same language you use to write AngularJS apps.
Follow these simple steps, and in minutes, you will have you first Protractor test running:
1) Set up environment
Install the command line tools 'protractor' and 'webdriver-manager' using npm:
npm install -g protractor
Start up an instance of a selenium server:
webdriver-manager update & webdriver-manager start
This downloads the necessary binary, and starts a new webdriver session listening on http://localhost:4444.
2) Write your test
// It is a good idea to use page objects to modularize your testing logic
var angularHomepage = {
nameInput : element(by.model('yourName')),
greeting : element(by.binding('yourName')),
get : function() {
setName : function(name) {
// Here we are using the Jasmine test framework
// See http://jasmine.github.io/2.0/introduction.html for more details
describe('angularjs homepage', function() {
it('should greet the named user', function(){
toEqual('Hello Julie!');
3) Write a Protractor configuration file to specify the environment under which you want your test to run:
exports.config = {
seleniumAddress: 'http://localhost:4444/wd/hub',
specs: ['testFolder/*'],
multiCapabilities: [{
'browserName': 'chrome',
// browser-specific tests
specs: 'chromeTests/*'
}, {
'browserName': 'firefox',
// run tests in parallel
shardTestFiles: true
baseUrl: 'http://www.angularjs.org',
4) Run the test:
Start the test with the command:
protractor conf.js
The test output should be:
1 test, 1 assertions, 0 failures
If you want to learn more, here's a full tutorial that highlights all of Protractor's features: http://angular.github.io/protractor/#/tutorial
GTAC 2014 is this Week!
Monday, October 27, 2014 18:26 PM
by Anthony Vallone on behalf of the GTAC Committee
The eighth GTAC commences on Tuesday at the Google Kirkland office. You can find the latest details on the conference at our site, including speaker profiles.
If you are watching remotely, we'll soon be updating the live stream page with the stream link and a Google Moderator link for remote Q&A.
If you have been selected to attend or speak, be sure to note the updated parking information. Google visitors will use off-site parking and shuttles.
We look forward to connecting with the greater testing community and sharing new advances and ideas.
Testing on the Toilet: Writing Descriptive Test Names
Monday, October 20, 2014 18:22 PM
by Andrew Trenk
This article was adapted from a Google Testing on the Toilet (TotT) episode. You can download a printer-friendly version of this TotT episode and post it in your office.
How long does it take you to figure out what behavior is being tested in the following code?
@Test public void isUserLockedOut_invalidLogin() {
authenticator.authenticate(username, invalidPassword);
authenticator.authenticate(username, invalidPassword);
authenticator.authenticate(username, invalidPassword);
You probably had to read through every line of code (maybe more than once) and understand what each line is doing. But how long would it take you to figure out what behavior is being tested if the test had this name?
You should now be able to understand what behavior is being tested by reading just the test name, and you don't even need to read through the test body. The test name in the above code sample hints at the scenario being tested ("invalidLogin"), but it doesn't actually say what the expected outcome is supposed to be, so you had to read through the code to figure it out.
Putting both the scenario and the expected outcome in the test name has several other benefits:
- If you want to know all the possible behaviors a class has, all you need to do is read through the test names in its test class, compared to spending minutes or hours digging through the test code or even the class itself trying to figure out its behavior. This can also be useful during code reviews since you can quickly tell if the tests cover all expected cases.
- By giving tests more explicit names, it forces you to split up testing different behaviors into separate tests. Otherwise you may be tempted to dump assertions for different behaviors into one test, which over time can lead to tests that keep growing and become difficult to understand and maintain.
- The exact behavior being tested might not always be clear from the test code. If the test name isn't explicit about this, sometimes you might have to guess what the test is actually testing.
- You can easily tell if some functionality isn't being tested. If you don't see a test name that describes the behavior you're looking for, then you know the test doesn't exist.
- When a test fails, you can immediately see what functionality is broken without looking at the test's source code.
There are several common patterns for structuring the name of a test (one example is to name tests like an English sentence with "should" in the name, e.g., shouldLockOutUserAfterThreeInvalidLoginAttempts). Whichever pattern you use, the same advice still applies: Make sure test names contain both the scenario being tested and the expected outcome.
Sometimes just specifying the name of the method under test may be enough, especially if the method is simple and has only a single behavior that is obvious from its name.
Announcing the GTAC 2014 Agenda
Wednesday, October 01, 2014 00:37 AM
by Anthony Vallone on behalf of the GTAC Committee
We have completed selection and confirmation of all speakers and attendees for GTAC 2014. You can find the detailed agenda at:
Thank you to all who submitted proposals! It was very hard to make selections from so many fantastic submissions.
There was a tremendous amount of interest in GTAC this year with over 1,500 applicants (up from 533 last year) and 194 of those for speaking (up from 88 last year). Unfortunately, our venue only seats 250. However, don't despair if you did not receive an invitation. Just like last year, anyone can join us via YouTube live streaming. We'll also be setting up Google Moderator, so remote attendees can get involved in Q&A after each talk. Information about live streaming, Moderator, and other details will be posted on the GTAC site soon and announced here.
Chrome - Firefox WebRTC Interop Test - Pt 2
Tuesday, September 09, 2014 20:09 PM
by Patrik Höglund
This is the second in a series of articles about Chrome's WebRTC Interop Test. See the first.
In the previous blog post we managed to write an automated test which got a WebRTC call between Firefox and Chrome to run. But how do we verify that the call actually worked?
bool WaitForCallToComeUp(content::WebContents* tab_contents) {
// Apprtc will set remoteVideo.style.opacity to 1 when the call comes up.
std::string javascript =
return test::PollingWaitUntil(javascript, "1", tab_contents);
Verifying Video is PlayingSo getting a call up is good, but what if there is a bug where Firefox and Chrome cannot send correct video streams to each other? To check that, we needed to step up our game a bit. We decided to use our existing video detector, which looks at a video element and determines if the pixels are changing. This is a very basic check, but it's better than nothing. To do this, we simply evaluate the .js file's JavaScript in the context of the Chrome tab, making the functions in the file available to us. The implementation then becomes
bool DetectRemoteVideoPlaying(content::WebContents* tab_contents) {
if (!EvalInJavascriptFile(tab_contents, GetSourceDir().Append(
return false;
if (!EvalInJavascriptFile(tab_contents, GetSourceDir().Append(
return false;
// The remote video tag is called remoteVideo in the AppRTC code.
StartDetectingVideo(tab_contents, "remoteVideo");
return true;
where StartDetectingVideo and WaitForVideoToPlay call the corresponding JavaScript methods in video_detector.js. If the video feed is frozen and unchanging, the test will time out and fail.
What to Send in the CallNow we can get a call up between the browsers and detect if video is playing. But what video should we send? For chrome, we have a convenient --use-fake-device-for-media-stream flag that will make Chrome pretend there's a webcam and present a generated video feed (which is a spinning green ball with a timestamp). This turned out to be useful since Firefox and Chrome cannot acquire the same camera at the same time, so if we didn't use the fake device we would have two webcams plugged into the bots executing the tests!
Bots running in Chrome's regular test infrastructure do not have either software or hardware webcams plugged into them, so this test must run on bots with webcams for Firefox to be able to acquire a camera. Fortunately, we have that in the WebRTC waterfalls in order to test that we can actually acquire hardware webcams on all platforms. We also added a check to just succeed the test when there's no real webcam on the system since we don't want it to fail when a dev runs it on a machine without a webcam:
if (!HasWebcamOnSystem())
It would of course be better if Firefox had a similar fake device, but to my knowledge it doesn't.
Downloading all Code and ComponentsNow we have all we need to run the test and have it verify something useful. We just have the hard part left: how do we actually download all the resources we need to run this test? Recall that this is actually a three-way integration test between Chrome, Firefox and AppRTC, which require the following:
- The AppEngine SDK in order to bring up the local AppRTC instance,
- The AppRTC code itself,
- Chrome (already present in the checkout), and
- Firefox nightly.
While developing the test, I initially just hand-downloaded these and installed and hard-coded the paths. This is a very bad idea in the long run. Recall that the Chromium infrastructure is comprised of thousands and thousands of machines, and while this test will only run on perhaps 5 at a time due to its webcam requirements, we don't want manual maintenance work whenever we replace a machine. And for that matter, we definitely don't want to download a new Firefox by hand every night and put it on the right location on the bots! So how do we automate this?
Downloading the AppEngine SDK
First, let's start with the easy part. We don't really care if the AppEngine SDK is up-to-date, so a relatively stale version is fine. We could have the test download it from the authoritative source, but that's a bad idea for a couple reasons. First, it updates outside our control. Second, there could be anti-robot measures on the page. Third, the download will likely be unreliable and fail the test occasionally.
The way we solved this was to upload a copy of the SDK to a Google storage bucket under our control and download it using the depot_tools script download_from_google_storage.py. This is a lot more reliable than an external website and will not download the SDK if we already have the right version on the bot.
Downloading the AppRTC Code
This code is on GitHub. Experience has shown that git clone commands run against GitHub will fail every now and then, and fail the test. We could either write some retry mechanism, but we have found it's better to simply mirror the git repository in Chromium's internal mirrors, which are closer to our bots and thereby more reliable from our perspective. The pull is done by a Chromium DEPS file (which is Chromium's dependency provisioning framework).
Downloading Firefox
It turns out that Firefox supplies handy libraries for this task. We're using mozdownload in this script in order to download the Firefox nightly build. Unfortunately this fails every now and then so we would like to have some retry mechanism, or we could write some mechanism to "mirror" the Firefox nightly build in some location we control.
Putting it TogetherWith that, we have everything we need to deploy the test. You can see the final code here.
The provisioning code above was put into a separate ".gclient solution" so that regular Chrome devs and bots are not burdened with downloading hundreds of megs of SDKs and code that they will not use. When this test runs, you will first see a Chrome browser pop up, which will ensure the local apprtc instance is up. Then a Firefox browser will pop up. They will each acquire the fake device and real camera, respectively, and after a short delay the AppRTC call will come up, proving that video interop is working.
This is a complicated and expensive test, but we believe it is worth it to keep the main interop case under automation this way, especially as the spec evolves and the browsers are in varying states of implementation.
Future Work
- Also run on Windows/Mac.
- Also test Opera.
- Interop between Chrome/Firefox mobile and desktop browsers.
- Also ensure audio is playing.
- Measure bandwidth stats, video quality, etc.
Chrome - Firefox WebRTC Interop Test - Pt 1
Tuesday, August 26, 2014 21:09 PM
by Patrik Höglund
WebRTC is probably the only web standard in which we need to test direct communication between Chrome and other browsers. Remember, WebRTC builds on peer-to-peer technology, which means we talk directly between browsers rather than through a server. Chrome, Firefox and Opera have announced support for WebRTC so far. To test interoperability, we set out to build an automated test to ensure that Chrome and Firefox can get a call up. This article describes how we implemented such a test and the tradeoffs we made along the way.
Calling in WebRTCSetting up a WebRTC call requires passing SDP blobs over a signaling connection. These blobs contain information on the capabilities of the endpoint, such as what media formats it supports and what preferences it has (for instance, perhaps the endpoint has VP8 decoding hardware, which means the endpoint will handle VP8 more efficiently than, say, H.264). By sending these blobs the endpoints can agree on what media format they will be sending between themselves and how to traverse the network between them. Once that is done, the browsers will talk directly to each other, and nothing gets sent over the signaling connection.
How these blobs are sent is up to the application. Usually the browsers connect to some server which mediates the connection between the browsers, for instance by using a contact list or a room number. The AppRTC reference application uses room numbers to pair up browsers and sends the SDP blobs from the browsers through the AppRTC server.
Test DesignInstead of designing a new signaling solution from scratch, we chose to use the AppRTC application we already had. This has the additional benefit of testing the AppRTC code, which we are also maintaining. We could also have used the small peerconnection_server binary and some JavaScript, which would give us additional flexibility in what to test. We chose to go with AppRTC since it effectively implements the signaling for us, leading to much less test code.
We assumed we would be able to get hold of the latest nightly Firefox and be able to launch that with a given URL. For the Chrome side, we assumed we would be running in a browser test, i.e. on a complete Chrome with some test scaffolding around it. For the first sketch of the test, we imagined just connecting the browsers to the live apprtc.appspot.com with some random room number. If the call got established, we would be able to look at the remote video feed on the Chrome side and verify that video was playing (for instance using the video+canvas grab trick). Furthermore, we could verify that audio was playing, for instance by using WebRTC getStats to measure the audio track energy level.
However, since we like tests to be hermetic, this isn't a good design. I can see several problems. For example, if the network between us and AppRTC is unreliable. Also, what if someone has occupied myroomid? If that were the case, the test would fail and we would be none the wiser. So to make this thing work, we would have to find some way to bring up the AppRTC instance on localhost to make our test hermetic.
Bringing up AppRTC on localhostAppRTC is a Google App Engine application. As this hello world example demonstrates, one can test applications locally with
google_appengine/dev_appserver.py apprtc_code/
So why not just call this from our test? It turns out we need to solve some complicated problems first, like how to ensure the AppEngine SDK and the AppRTC code is actually available on the executing machine, but we'll get to that later. Let's assume for now that stuff is just available. We can now write the browser test code to launch the local instance:
bool LaunchApprtcInstanceOnLocalhost()
// ... Figure out locations of SDK and apprtc code ...
CommandLine command_line(CommandLine::NO_PROGRAM);
VLOG(1) << "Running " << command_line.GetCommandLineString();
return base::LaunchProcess(command_line, base::LaunchOptions(),
That's pretty straightforward [1].
Figuring out Whether the Local Server is UpThen we ran into a very typical test problem. So we have the code to get the server up, and launching the two browsers to connect to http://localhost:9999?r=some_room is easy. But how do we know when to connect? When I first ran the test, it would work sometimes and sometimes not depending on if the server had time to get up.
It's tempting in these situations to just add a sleep to give the server time to get up. Don't do that. That will result in a test that is flaky and/or slow. In these situations we need to identify what we're really waiting for. We could probably monitor the stdout of the dev_appserver.py and look for some message that says "Server is up!" or equivalent. However, we're really waiting for the server to be able to serve web pages, and since we have two browsers that are really good at connecting to servers, why not use them? Consider this code.
bool LocalApprtcInstanceIsUp() {
// Load the admin page and see if we manage to load it right.
ui_test_utils::NavigateToURL(browser(), GURL("localhost:9998"));
content::WebContents* tab_contents =
std::string javascript =
std::string result;
if (!content::ExecuteScriptAndExtractString(tab_contents,
return false;
return result == kTitlePageOfAppEngineAdminPage;
Here we ask Chrome to load the AppEngine admin page for the local server (we set the admin port to 9998 earlier, remember?) and ask it what its title is. If that title is "Instances", the admin page has been displayed, and the server must be up. If the server isn't up, Chrome will fail to load the page and the title will be something like "localhost:9999 is not available".
Then, we can just do this from the test:
while (!LocalApprtcInstanceIsUp())
VLOG(1) << "Waiting for AppRTC to come up...";
If the server never comes up, for whatever reason, the test will just time out in that loop. If it comes up we can safely proceed with the rest of test.
Launching the BrowsersA browser window launches itself as a part of every Chromium browser test. It's also easy for the test to control the command line switches the browser will run under.
We have less control over the Firefox browser since it is the "foreign" browser in this test, but we can still pass command-line options to it when we invoke the Firefox process. To make this easier, Mozilla provides a Python library called mozrunner. Using that we can set up a launcher python script we can invoke from the test:
from mozprofile import profile
from mozrunner import runner
'media.navigator.permission.disabled': True,
def main():
# Set up flags, handle SIGTERM, etc
# ...
firefox_profile =
firefox_runner = runner.FirefoxRunner(
profile=firefox_profile, binary=options.binary,
Notice that we need to pass special preferences to make Firefox accept the getUserMedia prompt. Otherwise, the test would get stuck on the prompt and we would be unable to set up a call. Alternatively, we could employ some kind of clickbot to click "Allow" on the prompt when it pops up, but that is way harder to set up.
Without going into too much detail, the code for launching the browsers becomes
GURL room_url =
base::RandInt(0, 65536)));
content::WebContents* chrome_tab =
Where LaunchFirefoxWithUrl essentially runs this:
run_firefox_webrtc.py --binary /path/to/firefox --webpage http://localhost::9999?r=my_room
Now we can launch the two browsers. Next time we will look at how we actually verify that the call worked, and how we actually download all resources needed by the test in a maintainable and automated manner. Stay tuned!
1The explicit ports are because the default ports collided on the bots we were running on, and the --skip_sdk_update_check was because the SDK stopped and asked us something if there was an update.
Testing on the Toilet: Web Testing Made Easier: Debug IDs
Wednesday, August 13, 2014 17:58 PM
by Ruslan Khamitov
This article was adapted from a Google Testing on the Toilet (TotT) episode. You can download a printer-friendly version of this TotT episode and post it in your office.
Adding ID attributes to elements can make it much easier to write tests that interact with the DOM (e.g., WebDriver tests). Consider the following DOM with two buttons that differ only by inner text:
|Save button
|Edit button
<div class="button">Save</div>
<div class="button">Edit</div>
How would you tell WebDriver to interact with the "Save" button in this case? You have several options. One option is to interact with the button using a CSS selector:
However, this approach is not sufficient to identify a particular button, and there is no mechanism to filter by text in CSS. Another option would be to write an XPath, which is generally fragile and discouraged:
//div[@class='button' and text()='Save']
Your best option is to add unique hierarchical IDs where each widget is passed a base ID that it prepends to the ID of each of its children. The IDs for each button will be:
In GWT you can accomplish this by overriding onEnsureDebugId()on your widgets. Doing so allows you to create custom logic for applying debug IDs to the sub-elements that make up a custom widget:
@Override protected void onEnsureDebugId(String baseId) {
saveButton.ensureDebugId(baseId + ".save-button");
editButton.ensureDebugId(baseId + ".edit-button");
Consider another example. Let's set IDs for repeated UI elements in Angular using ng-repeat. Setting an index can help differentiate between repeated instances of each element:
<tr id="feedback-{{$index}}" class="feedback" ng-repeat="feedback in ctrl.feedbacks" >
In GWT you can do this with ensureDebugId(). Let's set an ID for each of the table cells:
@UiField FlexTable table;
UIObject.ensureDebugId(table.getCellFormatter().getElement(rowIndex, columnIndex),
baseID + colIndex + "-" + rowIndex);
Take-away: Debug IDs are easy to set and make a huge difference for testing. Please add them early.
Testing on the Toilet: Don't Put Logic in Tests
Thursday, July 31, 2014 16:59 PM
by Erik Kuefler
This article was adapted from a Google Testing on the Toilet (TotT) episode. You can download a printer-friendly version of this TotT episode and post it in your office.
Programming languages give us a lot of expressive power. Concepts like operators and conditionals are important tools that allow us to write programs that handle a wide range of inputs. But this flexibility comes at the cost of increased complexity, which makes our programs harder to understand.
Unlike production code, simplicity is more important than flexibility in tests. Most unit tests verify that a single, known input produces a single, known output. Tests can avoid complexity by stating their inputs and outputs directly rather than computing them. Otherwise it's easy for tests to develop their own bugs.
Let's take a look at a simple example. Does this test look correct to you?
@Test public void shouldNavigateToPhotosPage() {
String baseUrl = "http://plus.google.com/";
Navigator nav = new Navigator(baseUrl);
assertEquals(baseUrl + "/u/0/photos", nav.getCurrentUrl());
The author is trying to avoid duplication by storing a shared prefix in a variable. Performing a single string concatenation doesn't seem too bad, but what happens if we simplify the test by inlining the variable?
@Test public void shouldNavigateToPhotosPage() {
Navigator nav = new Navigator("http://plus.google.com/");
assertEquals("http://plus.google.com//u/0/photos", nav.getCurrentUrl()); // Oops!
After eliminating the unnecessary computation from the test, the bug is obvious—we're expecting two slashes in the URL! This test will either fail or (even worse) incorrectly pass if the production code has the same bug. We never would have written this if we stated our inputs and outputs directly instead of trying to compute them. And this is a very simple example—when a test adds more operators or includes loops and conditionals, it becomes increasingly difficult to be confident that it is correct.
When tests do need their own logic, such logic should often be moved out of the test bodies and into utilities and helper functions. Since such helpers can get quite complex, it's usually a good idea for any nontrivial test utility to have its own tests.
The Deadline to Sign up for GTAC 2014 is Jul 28
Wednesday, July 23, 2014 00:53 AM
Posted by Anthony Vallone on behalf of the GTAC Committee
The deadline to sign up for GTAC 2014 is next Monday, July 28th, 2014. There is a great deal of interest to both attend and speak, and we've received many outstanding proposals. However, it's not too late to add yours for consideration. If you would like to speak or attend, be sure to complete the form by Monday.
We will be making regular updates to our site over the next several weeks, and you can find conference details there:
For those that have already signed up to attend or speak, we will contact you directly in mid August.
Measuring Coverage at Google
Monday, July 14, 2014 19:45 PM
By Marko Ivanković, Google Zürich
Code coverage is a very interesting metric, covered by a large body of research that reaches somewhat contradictory results. Some people think it is an extremely useful metric and that a certain percentage of coverage should be enforced on all code. Some think it is a useful tool to identify areas that need more testing but don't necessarily trust that covered code is truly well tested. Others yet think that measuring coverage is actively harmful because it provides a false sense of security.
Our team's mission was to collect coverage related data then develop and champion code coverage practices across Google. We designed an opt-in system where engineers could enable two different types of coverage measurements for their projects: daily and per-commit. With daily coverage, we run all tests for their project, where as with per-commit coverage we run only the tests affected by the commit. The two measurements are independent and many projects opted into both.
While we did experiment with branch, function and statement coverage, we ended up focusing mostly on statement coverage because of its relative simplicity and ease of visualization.
How we measured
Our job was made significantly easier by the wonderful Google build system whose parallelism and flexibility allowed us to simply scale our measurements to Google scale. The build system had integrated various language-specific open source coverage measurement tools like Gcov (C++), Emma / JaCoCo (Java) and Coverage.py (Python), and we provided a central system where teams could sign up for coverage measurement.
For daily whole project coverage measurements, each team was provided with a simple cronjob that would run all tests across the project's codebase. The results of these runs were available to the teams in a centralized dashboard that displays charts showing coverage over time and allows daily / weekly / quarterly / yearly aggregations and per-language slicing. On this dashboard teams can also compare their project (or projects) with any other project, or Google as a whole.
For per-commit measurement, we hook into the Google code review process (briefly explained in this article) and display the data visually to both the commit author and the reviewers. We display the data on two levels: color coded lines right next to the color coded diff and a total aggregate number for the entire commit.
Displayed above is a screenshot of the code review tool. The green line coloring is the standard diff coloring for added lines. The orange and lighter green coloring on the line numbers is the coverage information. We use light green for covered lines, orange for non-covered lines and white for non-instrumented lines.
It's important to note that we surface the coverage information before the commit is submitted to the codebase, because this is the time when engineers are most likely to be interested in improving it.
One of the main benefits of working at Google is the scale at which we operate. We have been running the coverage measurement system for some time now and we have collected data for more than 650 different projects, spanning 100,000+ commits. We have a significant amount of data for C++, Java, Python, Go and JavaScript code.
I am happy to say that we can share some preliminary results with you today:
The chart above is the histogram of average values of measured absolute coverage across Google. The median (50th percentile) code coverage is 78%, the 75th percentile 85% and 90th percentile 90%. We believe that these numbers represent a very healthy codebase.
We have also found it very interesting that there are significant differences between languages:
The table above shows the total coverage of all analyzed code for each language, averaged over the past quarter. We believe that the large difference is due to structural, paradigm and best practice differences between languages and the more precise ability to measure coverage in certain languages.
Note that these numbers should not be interpreted as guidelines for a particular language, the aggregation method used is too simple for that. Instead this finding is simply a data point for any future research that analyzes samples from a single programming language.
The feedback from our fellow engineers was overwhelmingly positive. The most loved feature was surfacing the coverage information during code review time. This early surfacing of coverage had a statistically significant impact: our initial analysis suggests that it increased coverage by 10% (averaged across all commits).
Future work
We are aware that there are a few problems with the dataset we collected. In particular, the individual tools we use to measure coverage are not perfect. Large integration tests, end to end tests and UI tests are difficult to instrument, so large parts of code exercised by such tests can be misreported as non-covered.
We are working on improving the tools, but also analyzing the impact of unit tests, integration tests and other types of tests individually.
In addition to languages, we will also investigate other factors that might influence coverage, such as platforms and frameworks, to allow all future research to account for their effect.
We will be publishing more of our findings in the future, so stay tuned.
And if this sounds like something you would like to work on, why not apply on our job site?
ThreadSanitizer: Slaughtering Data Races
Monday, June 30, 2014 21:30 PM
by Dmitry Vyukov, Synchronization Lookout, Google, Moscow
I work in the Dynamic Testing Tools team at Google. Our team develops tools like AddressSanitizer, MemorySanitizer and ThreadSanitizer which find various kinds of bugs. In this blog post I want to tell you about ThreadSanitizer, a fast data race detector for C++ and Go programs.
First of all, what is a data race? A data race occurs when two threads access the same variable concurrently, and at least one of the accesses attempts is a write. Most programming languages provide very weak guarantees, or no guarantees at all, for programs with data races. For example, in C++ absolutely any data race renders the behavior of the whole program as completely undefined (yes, it can suddenly format the hard drive). Data races are common in concurrent programs, and they are notoriously hard to debug and localize. A typical manifestation of a data race is when a program occasionally crashes with obscure symptoms, the symptoms are different each time and do not point to any particular place in the source code. Such bugs can take several months of debugging without particular success, since typical debugging techniques do not work. Fortunately, ThreadSanitizer can catch most data races in the blink of an eye. See Chromium issue 15577 for an example of such a data race and issue 18488 for the resolution.
Due to the complex nature of bugs caught by ThreadSanitizer, we don't suggest waiting until product release validation to use the tool. For example, in Google, we've made our tools easily accessible to programmers during development, so that anyone can use the tool for testing if they suspect that new code might introduce a race. For both Chromium and Google internal server codebase, we run unit tests that use the tool continuously. This catches many regressions instantly. The Chromium project has recently started using ThreadSanitizer on ClusterFuzz, a large scale fuzzing system. Finally, some teams also set up periodic end-to-end testing with ThreadSanitizer under a realistic workload, which proves to be extremely valuable. When races are found by the tool, our team has zero tolerance for races and does not consider any race to be benign, as even the most benign races can lead to memory corruption.
Our tools are dynamic (as opposed to static tools). This means that they do not merely "look" at the code and try to surmise where bugs can be; instead they they instrument the binary at build time and then analyze dynamic behavior of the program to catch it red-handed. This approach has its pros and cons. On one hand, the tool does not have any false positives, thus it does not bother a developer with something that is not a bug. On the other hand, in order to catch a bug, the test must expose a bug -- the racing data access attempts must be executed in different threads. This requires writing good multi-threaded tests and makes end-to-end testing especially effective.
As a bonus, ThreadSanitizer finds some other types of bugs: thread leaks, deadlocks, incorrect uses of mutexes, malloc calls in signal handlers, and more. It also natively understands atomic operations and thus can find bugs in lock-free algorithms (see e.g. this bug in the V8 concurrent garbage collector).
The tool is supported by both Clang and GCC compilers (only on Linux/Intel64). Using it is very simple: you just need to add a -fsanitize=thread flag during compilation and linking. For Go programs, you simply need to add a -race flag to the go tool (supported on Linux, Mac and Windows).
Interestingly, after integrating the tool into compilers, we've found some bugs in the compilers themselves. For example, LLVM was illegally widening stores, which can introduce very harmful data races into otherwise correct programs. And GCC was injecting unsafe code for initialization of function static variables. Among our other trophies are more than a thousand bugs in Chromium, Firefox, the Go standard library, WebRTC, OpenSSL, and of course in our internal projects.
So what are you waiting for? You know what to do!
GTAC 2014: Call for Proposals & Attendance
Saturday, June 21, 2014 15:26 PM
Posted by Anthony Vallone on behalf of the GTAC Committee
The application process is now open for presentation proposals and attendance for GTAC (Google Test Automation Conference) (see initial announcement) to be held at the Google Kirkland office (near Seattle, WA) on October 28 - 29th, 2014.
GTAC will be streamed live on YouTube again this year, so even if you can't attend, you'll be able to watch the conference from your computer.
Presentations are targeted at student, academic, and experienced engineers working on test automation. Full presentations and lightning talks are 45 minutes and 15 minutes respectively. Speakers should be prepared for a question and answer session following their presentation.
For presentation proposals and/or attendance, complete this form. We will be selecting about 300 applicants for the event.
The due date for both presentation and attendance applications is July 28, 2014.
There are no registration fees, and we will send out detailed registration instructions to each invited applicant. Meals will be provided, but speakers and attendees must arrange and pay for their own travel and accommodations.
Update : Our contact email was bouncing - this is now fixed.
GTAC 2014 Coming to Seattle/Kirkland in October
Wednesday, June 04, 2014 19:21 PM
Posted by Anthony Vallone on behalf of the GTAC Committee
If you're looking for a place to discuss the latest innovations in test automation, then charge your tablets and pack your gumboots - the eighth GTAC (Google Test Automation Conference) will be held on October 28-29, 2014 at Google Kirkland! The Kirkland office is part of the Seattle/Kirkland campus in beautiful Washington state. This campus forms our third largest engineering office in the USA.
GTAC is a periodic conference hosted by Google, bringing together engineers from industry and academia to discuss advances in test automation and the test engineering computer science field. It's a great opportunity to present, learn, and challenge modern testing technologies and strategies.
You can browse the presentation abstracts, slides, and videos from last year on the GTAC 2013 page.
Stay tuned to this blog and the GTAC website for application information and opportunities to present at GTAC. Subscribing to this blog is the best way to get notified. We're looking forward to seeing you there!
Testing on the Toilet: Risk-Driven Testing
Friday, May 30, 2014 23:10 PM
by Peter Arrenbrecht
This article was adapted from a Google Testing on the Toilet (TotT) episode. You can download a printer-friendly version of this TotT episode and post it in your office.
We are all conditioned to write tests as we code: unit, functional, UI—the whole shebang. We are professionals, after all. Many of us like how small tests let us work quickly, and how larger tests inspire safety and closure. Or we may just anticipate flak during review. We are so used to these tests that often we no longer question why we write them. This can be wasteful and dangerous.
Tests are a means to an end: To reduce the key risks of a project, and to get the biggest bang for the buck. This bang may not always come from the tests that standard practice has you write, or not even from tests at all.
Two examples:
Outstanding practice. Missing the mark.
Our key risks were that we'd corrupt our data or bring down our servers for the sake of a debugging aid. None of the tests addressed this, but they gave a false sense of safety and "being done".
We stopped the launch.
Standard practice. Wasted effort.
The alert was so critical it actually needed end-to-end coverage for all scenarios. But it would be live for only three releases. The cheapest effective test? Manual testing before each release.
A Better Approach: Risks First
For every project or feature, think about testing. Brainstorm your key risks and your best options to reduce them. Do this at the start so you don't waste effort and can adapt your design. Write them down as a QA design so you can point to it in reviews and discussions.
To be sure, standard practice remains a good idea in most cases (hence it's standard). Small tests are cheap and speed up coding and maintenance, and larger tests safeguard core use-cases and integration.
Just remember: Your tests are a means. The bang is what counts. It's your job to maximize it.
Testing on the Toilet: Effective Testing
Wednesday, May 07, 2014 17:10 PM
by Rich Martin, Zurich
This article was adapted from a Google Testing on the Toilet (TotT) episode. You can download a printer-friendly version of this TotT episode and post it in your office.
Whether we are writing an individual unit test or designing a product's entire testing process, it is important to take a step back and think about how effective are our tests at detecting and reporting bugs in our code. To be effective, there are three important qualities that every test should try to maximize:
When the code under test is broken, the test fails. A high-fidelity test is one which is very sensitive to defects in the code under test, helping to prevent bugs from creeping into the code.
Maximize fidelity by ensuring that your tests cover all the paths through your code and include all relevant assertions on the expected state.
A test shouldn't fail if the code under test isn't defective. A resilient test is one that only fails when a breaking change is made to the code under test. Refactorings and other non-breaking changes to the code under test can be made without needing to modify the test, reducing the cost of maintaining the tests.
Maximize resilience by only testing the exposed API of the code under test; avoid reaching into internals. Favor stubs and fakes over mocks; don't verify interactions with dependencies unless it is that interaction that you are explicitly validating. A flaky test obviously has very low resilience.
When a test fails, a high-precision test tells you exactly where the defect lies. A well-written unit test can tell you exactly which line of code is at fault. Poorly written tests (especially large end-to-end tests) often exhibit very low precision, telling you that something is broken but not where.
Maximize precision by keeping your tests small and tightly focused. Choose descriptive method names that convey exactly what the test is validating. For system integration tests, validate state at every boundary.
These three qualities are often in tension with each other. It's easy to write a highly resilient test (the empty test, for example), but writing a test that is both highly resilient and high-fidelity is hard. As you design and write tests, use these qualities as a framework to guide your implementation.
Testing on the Toilet: Test Behaviors, Not Methods
Monday, April 14, 2014 21:25 PM
by Erik Kuefler
This article was adapted from a Google Testing on the Toilet (TotT) episode. You can download a printer-friendly version of this TotT episode and post it in your office.
After writing a method, it's easy to write just one test that verifies everything the method does. But it can be harmful to think that tests and public methods should have a 1:1 relationship. What we really want to test are behaviors, where a single method can exhibit many behaviors, and a single behavior sometimes spans across multiple methods.
Let's take a look at a bad test that verifies an entire method:
@Test public void testProcessTransaction() {
User user = newUserWithBalance(LOW_BALANCE_THRESHOLD.plus(dollars(2));
new Transaction("Pile of Beanie Babies", dollars(3)));
assertContains("You bought a Pile of Beanie Babies", ui.getText());
assertEquals(1, user.getEmails().size());
assertEquals("Your balance is low", user.getEmails().get(0).getSubject());
Displaying the name of the purchased item and sending an email about the balance being low are two separate behaviors, but this test looks at both of those behaviors together just because they happen to be triggered by the same method. Tests like this very often become massive and difficult to maintain over time as additional behaviors keep getting added in—eventually it will be very hard to tell which parts of the input are responsible for which assertions. The fact that the test's name is a direct mirror of the method's name is a bad sign.
It's a much better idea to use separate tests to verify separate behaviors:
@Test public void testProcessTransaction_displaysNotification() {
new User(), new Transaction("Pile of Beanie Babies"));
assertContains("You bought a Pile of Beanie Babies", ui.getText());
@Test public void testProcessTransaction_sendsEmailWhenBalanceIsLow() {
User user = newUserWithBalance(LOW_BALANCE_THRESHOLD.plus(dollars(2));
new Transaction(dollars(3)));
assertEquals(1, user.getEmails().size());
assertEquals("Your balance is low", user.getEmails().get(0).getSubject());
Now, when someone adds a new behavior, they will write a new test for that behavior. Each test will remain focused and easy to understand, no matter how many behaviors are added. This will make your tests more resilient since adding new behaviors is unlikely to break the existing tests, and clearer since each test contains code to exercise only one behavior.
The *Real* Test Driven Development
Wednesday, May 07, 2014 17:16 PM
by Kaue Silveira
Here at Google, we invest heavily in development productivity research. In fact, our TDD research group now occupies nearly an entire building of the Googleplex. The group has been working hard to minimize the development cycle time, and we'd like to share some of the amazing progress they've made.
The Concept
In the ways of old, it used to be that people wrote tests for their existing code. This was changed by TDD (Test-driven Development), where one would write the test first and then write the code to satisfy it. The TDD research group didn't think this was enough and wanted to elevate the humble test to the next level. We are pleased to announce the Real TDD, our latest innovation in the Program Synthesis field, where you write only the tests and have the computer write the code for you!
The following graph shows how the number of tests created by a small feature team grew since they started using this tool towards the end of 2013. Over the last 2 quarters, more than 89% of this team's production code was written by the tool!
Test written by a Software Engineer:
class LinkGeneratorTest(googletest.TestCase):
def setUp(self):
self.generator = link_generator.LinkGenerator()
def testGetLinkFromIDs(self):
expected = ('https://frontend.google.com/advancedSearchResults?'
actual = self.generator.GetLinkFromIDs(set((1346270, 1310696, 1288585)))
self.assertEqual(expected, actual)
Code created by our tool:
import urllib
class LinkGenerator(object):
def GetLinkFromIDs(self, ids):
result = []
for id in sorted(ids):
result.append('%s ' % id)
return self._URL + urllib.quote_plus(''.join(result))
Note that the tool is smart enough to not generate the obvious implementation of returning a constant string, but instead it correctly abstracts and generalizes the relation between inputs and outputs. It becomes smarter at every use and it's behaving more and more like a human programmer every day. We once saw a comment in the generated code that said "I need some coffee".
How does it work?
We've trained the Google Brain with billions of lines of open-source software to learn about coding patterns and how product code correlates with test code. Its accuracy is further improved by using Type Inference to infer types from code and the Girard-Reynolds Isomorphism to infer code from types.
The tool runs every time your unit test is saved, and it uses the learned model to guide a backtracking search for a code snippet that satisfies all assertions in the test. It provides sub-second responses for 99.5% of the cases (as shown in the following graph), thanks to millions of pre-computed assertion-snippet pairs stored in Spanner for global low-latency access.
How can I use it?
We will offer a free (rate-limited) service that everyone can use, once we have sorted out the legal issues regarding the possibility of mixing code snippets originating from open-source projects with different licenses (e.g., GPL-licensed tests will simply refuse to pass BSD-licensed code snippets). If you would like to try our alpha release before the public launch, leave us a comment!
Testing on the Toilet: What Makes a Good Test?
Tuesday, March 18, 2014 22:10 PM
by Erik Kuefler
This article was adapted from a Google Testing on the Toilet (TotT) episode. You can download a printer-friendly version of this TotT episode and post it in your office.
Unit tests are important tools for verifying that our code is correct. But writing good tests is about much more than just verifying correctness — a good unit test should exhibit several other properties in order to be readable and maintainable.
One property of a good test is clarity. Clarity means that a test should serve as readable documentation for humans, describing the code being tested in terms of its public APIs. Tests shouldn't refer directly to implementation details. The names of a class's tests should say everything the class does, and the tests themselves should serve as examples for how to use the class.
Two more important properties are completeness and conciseness. A test is complete when its body contains all of the information you need to understand it, and concise when it doesn't contain any other distracting information. This test fails on both counts:
@Test public void shouldPerformAddition() {
Calculator calculator = new Calculator(new RoundingStrategy(),
"unused", ENABLE_COSIN_FEATURE, 0.01, calculusEngine, false);
int result = calculator.doComputation(makeTestComputation());
assertEquals(5, result); // Where did this number come from?
Lots of distracting information is being passed to the constructor, and the important parts are hidden off in a helper method. The test can be made more complete by clarifying the purpose of the helper method, and more concise by using another helper to hide the irrelevant details of constructing the calculator:
@Test public void shouldPerformAddition() {
Calculator calculator = newCalculator();
int result = calculator.doComputation(makeAdditionComputation(2, 3));
assertEquals(5, result);
One final property of a good test is resilience. Once written, a resilient test doesn't have to change unless the purpose or behavior of the class being tested changes. Adding new behavior should only require adding new tests, not changing old ones. The original test above isn't resilient since you'll have to update it (and probably dozens of other tests!) whenever you add a new irrelevant constructor parameter. Moving these details into the helper method solved this problem.
When/how to use Mockito Answer
Monday, March 03, 2014 21:19 PM
by Hongfei Ding, Software Engineer, Shanghai
Mockito is a popular open source Java testing framework that allows the creation of mock objects. For example, we have the below interface used in our SUT (System Under Test):
interface Service {
Data get();
In our test, normally we want to fake the Service's behavior to return canned data, so that the unit test can focus on testing the code that interacts with the Service. We use when-return clause to stub a method.
But sometimes you need mock object behavior that's too complex for when-return. An Answer object can be a clean way to do this once you get the syntax right.
A common usage of Answer is to stub asynchronous methods that have callbacks. For example, we have mocked the interface below:
interface Service {
void get(Callback callback);
Here you'll find that when-return is not that helpful anymore. Answer is the replacement. For example, we can emulate a success by calling the onSuccess function of the callback.
doAnswer(new Answer<Void>() {
public Void answer(InvocationOnMock invocation) {
Callback callback = (Callback) invocation.getArguments()[0];
return null;
Answer can also be used to make smarter stubs for synchronous methods. Smarter here means the stub can return a value depending on the input, rather than canned data. It's sometimes quite useful. For example, we have mocked the Translator interface below:
interface Translator {
String translate(String msg);
We might choose to mock Translator to return a constant string and then assert the result. However, that test is not thorough, because the input to the translator function has been ignored. To improve this, we might capture the input and do extra verification, but then we start to fall into the "testing interaction rather than testing state" trap.
A good usage of Answer is to reverse the input message as a fake translation. So that both things are assured by checking the result string: 1) translate has been invoked, 2) the msg being translated is correct. Notice that this time we've used thenAnswer syntax, a twin of doAnswer, for stubbing a non-void method.
// extracted a method to put a descriptive name
private static Answer<String> reverseMsg() {
return new Answer<String>() {
public String answer(InvocationOnMock invocation) {
return reverseString((String) invocation.getArguments()[0]));
Last but not least, if you find yourself writing many nontrivial Answers, you should consider using a fake instead.
Minimizing Unreproducible Bugs
Thursday, March 27, 2014 21:39 PM
by Anthony Vallone
Unreproducible bugs are the bane of my existence. Far too often, I find a bug, report it, and hear back that it's not a bug because it can't be reproduced. Of course, the bug is still there, waiting to prey on its next victim. These types of bugs can be very expensive due to increased investigation time and overall lifetime. They can also have a damaging effect on product perception when users reporting these bugs are effectively ignored. We should be doing more to prevent them. In this article, I'll go over some obvious, and maybe not so obvious, development/testing guidelines that can reduce the likelihood of these bugs from occurring.
Avoid and test for race conditions, deadlocks, timing issues, memory corruption, uninitialized memory access, memory leaks, and resource issues
I am lumping together many bug types in this section, but they are all related somewhat by how we test for them and how disproportionately hard they are to reproduce and debug. The root cause and effect can be separated by milliseconds or hours, and stack traces might be nonexistent or misleading. A system may fail in strange ways when exposed to unusual traffic spikes or insufficient resources. Race conditions and deadlocks may only be discovered during unique traffic patterns or resource configurations. Timing issues may only be noticed when many components are integrated and their performance parameters and failure/retry/timeout delays create a chaotic system. Memory corruption or uninitialized memory access may go unnoticed for a large percentage of calls but become fatal for rare states. Memory leaks may be negligible unless the system is exposed to load for an extended period of time.
Guidelines for development:
- Simplify your synchronization logic. If it's too hard to understand, it will be difficult to reproduce and debug complex concurrency problems.
- Always obtain locks in the same order. This is a tried-and-true guideline to avoid deadlocks, but I still see code that breaks it periodically. Define an order for obtaining multiple locks and never change that order.
- Don't optimize by creating many fine-grained locks, unless you have verified that they are needed. Extra locks increase concurrency complexity.
- Avoid shared memory, unless you truly need it. Shared memory access is very easy to get wrong, and the bugs may be quite difficult to reproduce.
Guidelines for testing:
- Stress test your system regularly. You don't want to be surprised by unexpected failures when your system is under heavy load.
- Test timeouts. Create tests that mock/fake dependencies to test timeout code. If your timeout code does something bad, it may cause a bug that only occurs under certain system conditions.
- Test with debug and optimized builds. You may find that a well behaved debug build works fine, but the system fails in strange ways once optimized.
- Test under constrained resources. Try reducing the number of data centers, machines, processes, threads, available disk space, or available memory. Also try simulating reduced network bandwidth.
- Test for longevity. Some bugs require a long period of time to reveal themselves. For example, persistent data may become corrupt over time.
- Use dynamic analysis tools like memory debuggers, ASan, TSan, and MSan regularly. They can help identify many categories of unreproducible memory/threading issues.
Enforce preconditions
I've seen many well-meaning functions with a high tolerance for bad input. For example, consider this function:
void ScheduleEvent(int timeDurationMilliseconds) {
if (timeDurationMilliseconds <= 0) {
timeDurationMilliseconds = 1;
This function is trying to help the calling code by adjusting the input to an acceptable value, but it may be doing damage by masking a bug. The calling code may be experiencing any number of problems described in this article, and passing garbage to this function will always work fine. The more functions that are written with this level of tolerance, the harder it is to trace back to the root cause, and the more likely it becomes that the end user will see garbage. Enforcing preconditions, for instance by using asserts, may actually cause a higher number of failures for new systems, but as systems mature, and many minor/major problems are identified early on, these checks can help improve long-term reliability.
Guidelines for development:
- Enforce preconditions in your functions unless you have a good reason not to.
Use defensive programming
Defensive programming is another tried-and-true technique that is great at minimizing unreproducible bugs. If your code calls a dependency to do something, and that dependency quietly fails or returns garbage, how does your code handle it? You could test for situations like this via mocking or faking, but it's even better to have your production code do sanity checking on its dependencies. For example:
double GetMonthlyLoanPayment() {
double rate = GetTodaysInterestRateFromExternalSystem();
if (rate < 0.001 || rate > 0.5) {
throw BadInterestRate(rate);
Guidelines for development:
- When possible, use defensive programming to verify the work of your dependencies with known risks of failure like user-provided data, I/O operations, and RPC calls.
Guidelines for testing:
- Use fuzz testing to test your systems hardiness when enduring bad data.
Don't hide all errors from the user
There has been a trend in recent years toward hiding failures from users at all costs. In many cases, it makes perfect sense, but in some, we have gone overboard. Code that is very quiet and permissive during minor failures will allow an uninformed user to continue working in a failed state. The software may ultimately reach a fatal tipping point, and all the error conditions that led to failure have been ignored. If the user doesn't know about the prior errors, they will not be able to report them, and you may not be able to reproduce them.
Guidelines for development:
- Only hide errors from the user when you are certain that there is no impact to system state or the user.
- Any error with impact to the user should be reported to the user with instructions for how to proceed. The information shown to the user, combined with data available to an engineer, should be enough to determine what went wrong.
Test error handling
The most common sections of code to remain untested is error handling code. Don't skip test coverage here. Bad error handling code can cause unreproducible bugs and create great risk if it does not handle fatal errors well.
Guidelines for testing:
- Always test your error handling code. This is usually best accomplished by mocking or faking the component triggering the error.
- It's also a good practice to examine your log quality for all types of error handling.
Check for duplicate keys
If unique identifiers or data access keys are generated using random data or are not guaranteed to be globally unique, duplicate keys may cause data corruption or concurrency issues. Key duplication bugs are very difficult to reproduce.
Guidelines for development:
- Try to guarantee uniqueness of all keys.
- When not possible to guarantee unique keys, check if the recently generated key is already in use before using it.
- Watch out for potential race conditions here and avoid them with synchronization.
Test for concurrent data access
Some bugs only reveal themselves when multiple clients are reading/writing the same data. Your stress tests might be covering cases like these, but if they are not, you should have special tests for concurrent data access. Case like these are often unreproducible. For example, a user may have two instances of your app running against the same account, and they may not realize this when reporting a bug.
Guidelines for testing:
- Always test for concurrent data access if it's a feature of the system. Actually, even if it's not a feature, verify that the system rejects it. Testing concurrency can be challenging. An approach that usually works for me is to create many worker threads that simultaneously attempt access and a master thread that monitors and verifies that some number of attempts were indeed concurrent, blocked or allowed as expected, and all were successful. Programmatic post-analysis of all attempts and changing system state may also be necessary to ensure that the system behaved well.
Steer clear of undefined behavior and non-deterministic access to data
Some APIs and basic operations have warnings about undefined behavior when in certain states or provided with certain input. Similarly, some data structures do not guarantee an iteration order (example: Java's Set). Code that ignores these warnings may work fine most of the time but fail in unusual ways that are hard to reproduce.
Guidelines for development:
- Understand when the APIs and operations you use might have undefined behavior and prevent those conditions.
- Do not depend on data structure iteration order unless it is guaranteed. It is a common mistake to depend on the ordering of sets or associative arrays.
Log the details for errors or test failures
Issues described in this article can be easier to reproduce and debug when the logs contain enough detail to understand the conditions that led to an error.
Guidelines for development:
- Follow good logging practices, especially in your error handling code.
- If logs are stored on a user's machine, create an easy way for them to provide you the logs.
Guidelines for testing:
- Save your test logs for potential analysis later.
Anything to add?
Have I missed any important guidelines for minimizing these bugs? What is your favorite hard-to-reproduce bug that you discovered and resolved?
The Google Test and Development Environment - Pt. 3: Code, Build, and Test
Thursday, March 27, 2014 21:40 PM
by Anthony Vallone
This is the third in a series of articles about our work environment. See the first and second.
I will never forget the awe I felt when running my first load test on my first project at Google. At previous companies I've worked, running a substantial load test took quite a bit of resource planning and preparation. At Google, I wrote less than 100 lines of code and was simulating tens of thousands of users after just minutes of prep work. The ease with which I was able to accomplish this is due to the impressive coding, building, and testing tools available at Google. In this article, I will discuss these tools and how they affect our test and development process.
Coding and building
The tools and process for coding and building make it very easy to change production and test code. Even though we are a large company, we have managed to remain nimble. In a matter of minutes or hours, you can edit, test, review, and submit code to head. We have achieved this without sacrificing code quality by heavily investing in tools, testing, and infrastructure, and by prioritizing code reviews.
Have a strong preference for editor? Engineers are free to choose from many IDEs and editors. The most common are Eclipse, Emacs, Vim, and IntelliJ, but many others are used as well. Engineers that are passionate about their prefered editors have built up and shared some truly impressive editor plugins/tooling over the years.
Code reviews for all submissions are enforced via source control tooling. This also applies to test code, as our test code is held to the same standards as production code. The reviews are done via web-based code review tools that even include automatically generated test results. The process is very streamlined and efficient. Engineers can change and submit code in any part of the repository, but it must get reviewed by owners of the code being changed. This is great, because you can easily change code that your team depends on, rather than merely request a change to code you do not own.
The Google build system is used for building most code, and it is designed to work across many languages and platforms. It is remarkably simple to define and build targets. You won't be needing that old Makefile book.
Running jobs and tests
We have some pretty amazing machine and job management tools at Google. There is a generally available pool of machines in many data centers around the globe. The job management service makes it very easy to start jobs on arbitrary machines in any of these data centers. Failing machines are automatically removed from the pool, so tests rarely fail due to machine issues. With a little effort, you can also set up monitoring and pager alerting for your important jobs.
From any machine you can spin up a massive number of tests and run them in parallel across many machines in the pool, via a single command. Each of these tests are run in a standard, isolated environment, so we rarely run into the "it works on my machine!" issue.
Before code is submitted, presubmit tests can be run that will find all tests that depend transitively on the change and run them. You can also define presubmit rules that run checks on a code change and verify that tests were run before allowing submission.
Once you've submitted test code, the build and test system automatically registers the test, and starts building/testing continuously. If the test starts failing, your team will get notification emails. You can also visit a test dashboard for your team and get details about test runs and test data. Monitoring the build/test status is made even easier with our build orbs designed and built by Googlers. These small devices will glow red if the build starts failing. Many teams have had fun customizing these orbs to various shapes, including a statue of liberty with a glowing torch.
Running larger integration and end-to-end tests takes a little more work, but we have some excellent tools to help with these tests as well: Integration test runners, hermetic environment creation, virtual machine service, web test frameworks, etc.
The impact
So how do these tools actually affect our productivity? For starters, the code is easy to find, edit, review, and submit. Engineers are free to choose tools that make them most productive. Before and after submission, running small tests is trivial, and running large tests is relatively easy. Since tests are easy to create and run, it's fairly simple to maintain a green build, which most teams do most of the time. This allows us to spend more time on real problems and less on the things that shouldn't even be problems. It allows us to focus on creating rigorous tests. It dramatically accelerates the development process that can prototype Gmail in a day and code/test/release service features on a daily schedule. And, of course, it lets us focus on the fun stuff.
We are interested to hear your thoughts on this topic. Google has the resources to build tools like this, but would small or medium size companies benefit from a similar investment in its infrastructure? Did Google create the infrastructure or did the infrastructure create Google?
The Google Test and Development Environment - Pt. 2: Dogfooding and Office Software
Thursday, March 27, 2014 21:40 PM
by Anthony Vallone
This is the second in a series of articles about our work environment. See the first.
There are few things as frustrating as getting hampered in your work by a bug in a product you depend on. What if it's a product developed by your company? Do you report/fix the issue or just work around it and hope it'll go away soon? In this article, I'll cover how and why Google dogfoods its own products.
Google makes heavy use of its own products. We have a large ecosystem of development/office tools and use them for nearly everything we do. Because we use them on a daily basis, we can dogfood releases company-wide before launching to the public. These dogfood versions often have features unavailable to the public but may be less stable. Instability is exactly what you want in your tools, right? Or, would you rather that frustration be passed on to your company's customers? Of course not!
Dogfooding is an important part of our test process. Test teams do their best to find problems before dogfooding, but we all know that testing is never perfect. We often get dogfood bug reports for edge and corner cases not initially covered by testing. We also get many comments about overall product quality and usability. This internal feedback has, on many occasions, changed product design.
Not surprisingly, test-focused engineers often have a lot to say during the dogfood phase. I don't think there is a single public-facing product that I have not reported bugs on. I really appreciate the fact that I can provide feedback on so many products before release.
Interested in helping to test Google products? Many of our products have feedback links built-in. Some also have Beta releases available. For example, you can start using Chrome Beta and help us file bugs.
Office software
From system design documents, to test plans, to discussions about beer brewing techniques, our products are used internally. A company's choice of office tools can have a big impact on productivity, and it is fortunate for Google that we have such a comprehensive suite. The tools have a consistently simple UI (no manual required), perform very well, encourage collaboration, and auto-save in the cloud. Now that I am used to these tools, I would certainly have a hard time going back to the tools of previous companies I have worked. I'm sure I would forget to click the save buttons for years to come.
Examples of frequently used tools by engineers:
- Google Drive Apps (Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc.) are used for design documents, test plans, project data, data analysis, presentations, and more.
- Gmail and Hangouts are used for email and chat.
- Google Calendar is used to schedule all meetings, reserve conference rooms, and setup video conferencing using Hangouts.
- Google Maps is used to map office floors.
- Google Groups are used for email lists.
- Google Sites are used to host team pages, engineering docs, and more.
- Google App Engine hosts many corporate, development, and test apps.
- Chrome is our primary browser on all platforms.
- Google+ is used for organizing internal communities on topics such as food or C++, and for socializing.
We are interested to hear your thoughts on this topic. Do you dogfood your company's products? Do your office tools help or hinder your productivity? What office software and tools do you find invaluable for your job? Could you use Google Docs/Sheets for large test plans?
The Google Test and Development Environment - Pt. 1: Office and Equipment
Thursday, March 27, 2014 21:40 PM
by Anthony Vallone
When conducting interviews, I often get questions about our workspace and engineering environment. What IDEs do you use? What programming languages are most common? What kind of tools do you have for testing? What does the workspace look like?
Google is a company that is constantly pushing to improve itself. Just like software development itself, most environment improvements happen via a bottom-up approach. All engineers are responsible for fine-tuning, experimenting with, and improving our process, with a goal of eliminating barriers to creating products that amaze.
Office space and engineering equipment can have a considerable impact on productivity. I'll focus on these areas of our work environment in this first article of a series on the topic.
Office layout
Google is a highly collaborative workplace, so the open floor plan suits our engineering process. Project teams composed of Software Engineers (SWEs), Software Engineers in Test (SETs), and Test Engineers (TEs) all sit near each other or in large rooms together. The test-focused engineers are involved in every step of the development process, so it's critical for them to sit with the product developers. This keeps the lines of communication open.
The office space is far from rigid, and teams often rearrange desks to suit their preferences. The facilities team recently finished renovating a new floor in the New York City office, and after a day of engineering debates on optimal arrangements and white board diagrams, the floor was completely transformed.
Besides the main office areas, there are lounge areas to which Googlers go for a change of scenery or a little peace and quiet. If you are trying to avoid becoming a casualty of The Great Foam Dart War, lounges are a great place to hide.
Working with remote teams
Google's worldwide headquarters is in Mountain View, CA, but it's a very global company, and our project teams are often distributed across multiple sites. To help keep teams well connected, most of our conference rooms have video conferencing equipment. We make frequent use of this equipment for team meetings, presentations, and quick chats.
What's at your desk?
All engineers get high-end machines and have easy access to data center machines for running large tasks. A new member on my team recently mentioned that his Google machine has 16 times the memory of the machine at his previous company.
Most Google code runs on Linux, so the majority of development is done on Linux workstations. However, those that work on client code for Windows, OS X, or mobile, develop on relevant OSes. For displays, each engineer has a choice of either two 24 inch monitors or one 30 inch monitor. We also get our choice of laptop, picking from various models of Chromebook, MacBook, or Linux. These come in handy when going to meetings, lounges, or working remotely.
We are interested to hear your thoughts on this topic. Do you prefer an open-office layout, cubicles, or private offices? Should test teams be embedded with development teams, or should they operate separately? Do the benefits of offering engineers high-end equipment outweigh the costs?


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Rescue Lula is All Smiles in Walkin Wheels
Lula Rescue Chessie loves her new Walkn' Wheels! Lula is a permanent foster of the Chesapeake Retriever Rescue of WI . Lula came to the rescue from Duluth, MN in November 2009 with severe hip dysplasia and two ruptured ACL's. She is about 10 years old and 115 pounds- she is often accused of being overweight but she has very large bones and a very fluffy coat. Lula LOVES to go for walks. She likes to walk at least 3-4 times a day. At the beginning of February, Lula's right hip started to give out on her and she would fall. We had not considered wheels until we saw Walkin' Wheels at the Pet Expo in Milwaukee. Thanks to donations from many of Lula's generous Facebook friends and her blog followers, we were able to purchase the Walkin' Wheels. Lula is once again enjoying her walks multiple times a day. Her tail wags non-stop as she rolls around the neighborhood!
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subset: commoncrawl


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Is it possible to place a filter on a ServletWrapper? I've tried to do it the same way you would with an HTTPFrame, but it doesn't seem to work. ? Art _________________________________________________________ Better than free email: shared calendar, files, and more... Get your 'Visto Briefcase' at http://www.visto.com/infoReceived on Friday, 9 April 1999 03:47:35 GMT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0+W3C-0.50 : Monday, 9 April 2012 12:13:29 GMT


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The credits for this production have not yet been completed or verified.
Across the Street
Hudson Theatre , (3/24/1924 - circa. 4/1924)
Category: Play, Comedy, Original, Broadway
Description: A play in three acts
Setting: The Bagley Dry Goods Store, the Editorial Room of the Glendale Observer, and the Town Hall


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Well, it has been a long time since I have updated this blog. So many things going on. To keep this update (and future ones) maintainable, let me keep the topic this week to my participation at RSA. RSA is in San Francisco this week. This is one of my favorite trade shows since it is focused around Information Security. I will be giving a speech on Symantec's view of the future of Enterprise Security on Wednesday morning at 9:15am.
Besides giving a speech, there are also a few areas that I plan to investigate at RSA. First, I want to see how all the smaller NAC players are doing. There are considerably less of them today then there were last year. Companies like Lockdown have closed their doors. Our NAC solution is doing very well, in terms of customer feedback. I think building it on top of our endpoint protection product is making adoption that much easier. In addition, having the flexibility with respect to enforcement is well received.
Another area I will be looking at is where we face the stiffest competition. I will be checking in with my fellow AV competitors like McAfee, Trend, Microsoft, Sophos, et al... I like to see what their current marketing/positioning looks like. Microsoft is the obvious big one to look at. They do not have much share in the market currently but they can do small things that have a big impact. We have to keep a lookout for those small things. ;)
Finally, I am going to be looking for more examples of the convergence between security and operations on the endpoint. As the reader may now, Symantec now owns Altiris, which was an endpoint management company. We are already working through ways to integrate our endpoint security and management capabilities. I think the end result will be an ability unsurpassed in the market to manage and secure more endpoints from more threats from more places in the world.
I will update the blog again in a week's time to let you know how the week at RSA goes.


text: No Benefit fr/ Hyoscyam :-( I have had IBS-D for several years that seemed to be controllable by OTC medications (pepto, immodium) up until last December. It was then that I started having major flare-ups that completely disrupted my life (extreme sense of urgency, pain, discomfort, etc.) My GI specialist first tried me on Hyoscyam, but I had absolutely no benefits from this drug whatsoever. It was only when I was switched over to Pamine that I received SIGNIFICANT relief. If Hyoscyam does not work for your IBS-D, then I recommend you speak to your doctor about switching to Pamine.


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Jeff, and his excellent team, provide remarkable first-class, personal customer service. Other stores take notice!!! Just got my order in- so...Read More ->
I must express my gratitude and happiness for the very fast, and friendly service that MJM Magic gave to me. I ordered an effect on a Monday, and...Read More ->


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Archinect - News 2014-12-20T07:23:54-05:00 http://archinect.com/news/article/81097691/thresholds-marks-the-unmarked-at-kent-cemetery 'Thresholds' marks the unmarked at Kent cemetery Bradly Gunn 2013-09-05T14:20:00-04:00 >2013-09-06T11:32:34-04:00
"It is amazing to realize you could walk around the site not knowing if there is a body underneath you," Nelson said. "How do you commemorate that?"

 Of the approximately 200 people buried at Saar Pioneer Cemetery, there are 89 unmarked graves, each unable to inform visitors of their presence and the role they played in Kent history. Collaborative artists Frances Nelson and Bradly Gunn seek to mark the unmarked by creating a series "thresholds" to walk under and pass through, as an acknowledgement of the final resting place of Kent's founding pioneers.

 THRESHOLDS is generously supported by 4Culture's Site Specific Program and the University of Washington's College of Built Environment's Digital Fabrication Lab, with additional support from McLendon Hardware, Dunn Lumber and Miller Paint Co.
 http://archinect.com/news/article/68553691/the-dead-architects-society The Dead Architects Society Archinect 2013-03-01T09:17:00-05:00 >2013-03-04T21:10:43-05:00
In Santa Barbara, Calif., the hot architect in town is George Washington Smith. In Charlottesville, Va., it's Eugene Bradbury. And in the small town of Washington, Conn., homes by Ehrick Rossiter are prized. These architects have a few things in common: They're long dead, they're relatively unknown outside the small, affluent pockets where they practiced in the early 20th century and they've all made a comeback.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"> <meta> http://archinect.com/news/article/60245032/john-m-johansen-last-of-harvard-five-architects-dies-at-96 John M. Johansen, Last of 'Harvard Five' Architects, Dies at 96 Archinect 2012-10-28T16:10:00-04:00 >2012-11-04T23:51:53-05:00
John M. Johansen, a celebrated Modernist architect and the last surviving member of the Harvard Five, a group that made New Canaan, Conn., a hotbed of architectural experimentation in the 1950s and '60s, died on Friday in Brewster, Mass. He was 96.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"> <meta>


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Mar. 1 to 23: �Student Drawing Exhibition,� NHC Library Gallery. Free.
Mar. 1 to 30: �Immaculate Memory,� current works by Alison Hahn will be displayed, NHC Fine Arts Gallery. Free.
Mar. 1 to May 4: �Sculpture Vision XV,� annual outdoor sculpture exhibition showcasing area artists. Sculpture pieces are displayed around the NHC campus. Free.
Mar. 23: �Forensics Showcase,� NHC team presents a night of oral interpretation from all genres (poetry, prose, and dramatic literature), 7 p.m., NHC Performing Arts Theatre. Free.
Mar. 26: �Ooooh La La,� enjoy the wonders of France with this recital by the NHC and Cy-Fair Voice Faculty, noon, NHC Performing Arts Theatre. Free.
Mar. 28: �Student Recital,� a showcase of soloists from NHC music programs, noon, Performing ArtsTheatre. Free.
Mar. 28 to Apr. 20: �Student Painting Exhibition,� current works displayed from portfolios of NHC visual arts students, NHC Library Gallery. Reception Mar. 28, 1 p.m., NHC Library Gallery. Free.
Mar. 29: �Music Department Showcase,� a concert of ensembles and selected student soloists from the music department to raise funds for music students, 7 p.m., Performing Arts Theatre. Tickets $5.
For more information about any of NHC�s Visual, Applied and Performing Arts programs, call 281.765.7812.
North Harris College is located at 2700 W.W. Thorne Drive., one-half mile south of FM 1960 East, between Aldine-Westfield and Hardy Roads. To listen to NHC�s newest podcasts visit: podcasts.northharriscollege.com. For more information about the college, call 281.618.5400 or visit: northharris.lonestar.edu.
NHMCCD, among the five largest and fastest growing community colleges in Texas, comprises, North Harris College, Kingwood College, Tomball College, Montgomery College, Cy-Fair College, six satellite centers, and The University Center.
For media inquiries please contact:
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The Good size. The Strong plastic. Very reliable fastening. Has Installed on oficce easy chair, on handle. The Ideal variant for spare place on worker table. The pad for mouse in size most stands. Install easy and simply - holds much well. When inserting with easy chairs mouse jump. But this spring of ... Read more
* Relevant size (not too big, not to small) * Simple but robust plastic * Removable rubber mouse pad * Versatile product that can be installed in two way: desktop or chair's armrest (and that can be changed at any time) When installing on a chair, you'd might want to place it the foremost (so it's still ... Read more


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Funny Is Funny
Post your Comments or Review
This page has been viewed 26 times this month, and 455 times total.
Funny Is FunnyFunny Is Funny (1966) Theatrical Cartoon
This page has been viewed 26 times this month, and 455 times total.
- Theatrical ShortShort
- Traditional Animation
- Ed Graham Productions
- Distributed by: Universal Pictures
- Cartoon Characters: Brutus, Brownie.
- Voice Actors: Carl Reiner, Ed Graham Jr..
- Directed By Ed Graham Jr.
- Produced By Ed Graham Jr.
- Animated By Amby Paliwoda, Manny Gould, Ed Friedman, Ed Solomon, Ruth Platt.
- Written By Ed Graham Jr., Carl Reiner.
- Music: The George Shearing Trio.
- Editor: George Mahana, Armand Shaw.
- Originally Released in 1966 (Estimate).
- Originally Released Theatrically.
- Running Time: 7 minutes.
- Color
Cartoon Summary:
Brutus and Brownie debate the merits of cartoon violence, with Brutus reenacting some of the moments on the hapless Brownie.
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text: Contemporary adolescent and young adult culture has embraced tattoing and body piercing, ostensibly as a form of self-expression. It seems that if not tattooed themselves, there are very few degrees of separation between any adolescent and someone in their life who bears a tattoo or is pierced somewhere on their body. Sports stars, rock stars and movie and telvision icons are covered in images and piercings; but we expect that of them, for they are in the public eye.


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|New King James Version (NKJV)
|New International Version (NIV)
|49 While He was still speaking, someone came from the ruler of the synagogue's house, saying to him, "Your daughter is dead. Do not trouble the Teacher."
|49 While Jesus was still speaking, someone came from the house of Jairus, the synagogue ruler. "Your daughter is dead," he said. "Don't bother the teacher any more."
|Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. (New King James Version)
|Scripture quoted by permission. Quotations designated (NIV) are from THE HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica. All rights reserved worldwide. (New International Version Bible Online)


text:
© 2001-2014 Viking Range, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
= Owner's Exclusive Content
The Viking Store - Closed
1745 Peachtree Street, NE
Atlanta, GA 30309-2404
Permanently Closed.
Phone: 404.745.9064
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Gather your special circle of friends for an enchanted evening of food and fun. This celebratory, sophisticated menu is ideal for guests lending a hand in the kitchen while spending some memorable moments together. But, if you prefer to run the show alone - much of the menu may be made ahead of time, allowing you to spend more time enjoying your guests.
SKILLS AND TECHNIQUES Making a special-occasion, seasonal meal; making the creamiest risotto; preparing a classical French veal dish; working with crabmeat; creating an emulsion sauce; making a vinaigrette.
Adult classes are designed for students 16 years of age or older. (Note: Students must be 21 years of age to consume alcohol.) Alcohol is not served at our Anchorage location.
This class is currently not available at this location. Please check our calendar for available class offerings.
Or check out these classes:


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Fred returns to his mistress Velvet after four years apart, claiming to have left his wife. But when she rejects his attempts to rekindle their romance, his persistence turns into obsession — and a dark history between the former lovers comes into focus.
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Perrier's Bounty
Description: Follows three fugitives on the run from a big-time gangster out for revenge following the accidental death of one of his gang members.
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Dr. Gordon Prescott graduated from Albany Medical College in 1974. Dr. Prescott has two offices in West Virginia.
Specializing in the field of Internal Medicine, Dr. Prescott is prepared to provide care to adult patients suffering from a wide range of illnesses and diseases, ranging from the very common to the very rare. Dr. Prescott is also trained in general medicine, and is capable of treating patients for diseases that may have overlapping symptoms or complications. Dr. Prescott is also trained to practice Cardiology and Nuclear Medicine.
Dr. Prescott works with one doctor, Dr. Abdul Piricha.
Treats adult diseases – internists are known for diagnostic skills and the ability to manage multi-system diseases.
Deals with conditions, abnormalities and diseases of the heart and cardiovascular system.
Utilizes radioactive substances and imaging modalities to diagnose and treat disease.


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Is President Obama Using Social Media for the Right Reasons?
| Posted 08.04.2011 | Technology
Read More: Social Media, Twitter, Social Networking, Barack Obama, Obama Twitter, Obama Twitter Town Hall, Technology News
Twitter may be too terse and too immediate for relaying more complex issues. It may be showing us its limitations as a medium for protest and debate. But it's perfect for affirming your approval of a candidate.


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February 01st, 1968
The Experience fly to San Francisco to play two shows at the Fillmore Auditorium. The supporting cast includes Albert King, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, and Soft Machine. The Experience's first set includes "Red House," "Purple Haze," "Foxey Lady," "Fire," and "The Wind Cries Mary."
March 09th, 1968
Supported by Soft Machine, The Experience play New York State University in Long Island, New York. Included in the evening's performance are "Red House," "I Don't Live Today," "Purple Haze," and "Wild Thing."


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Thursday in photosDec. 13: The Queen and a pile of gold, Hanukkah in Israel, bust of Obama
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France's Alexandra Lacrabere, center, is fouled by Serbia's Svetlana Ognjenovic, left, and Sanja Rajovic during their Group 1 women's handball European Championship match in Belgrade, Serbia, Thursday, Dec. 13, 2012. (AP Photo/Marko Drobnjakovic)
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