One of firefox killer-features is the variety of add-ons. Following is an overview of the add-ons I use currently.

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TestNG offers many great features and is definitely more capable as JUnit to build a strong automated Test-Suite. When writing test-cases one important factor is the handling of test-data. With JUnit it is cumbersome to feed different test-data to the same test-code. TestNG solves this much better.

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After 3 years of working with ClearCase SCM tool I came to the point that you should not use it for developing software. Surely it has its moments: The branching and merging capabilities are good and the graphical version tree is nice. Also the concept of the config-spec, which is a kind of query-language for [...]

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As software engineers we get overwhelmed by the masses of bad-quality source code we work with each day. At this stage improvement of all these source code artifacts is a never ending story. To tackle this problem IntelliJ IDE goes the step-by-step improvement approach, where it runs actions and includes its powerfull code inspections on [...]

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Exception constructs in modern languages have replaced the way to map an error condition by a return value (like for instance in C). If used properly analyzation of error conditions and their handling can be performed very well. Never the less in Java, the so called checked exceptions are annoying since long (as a side [...]

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You are using unit-tests to ensure that production code works as defined or specified from the class-level view. This way you either get feedback that your implementation works as wanted (green-bar=success) or not (red-bar=fail). Unfortunately tests are also man-crafted work and can contain bugs. Following article shows what kind of test-errors exist and what [...]

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To master frameworks (Spring, Hibernate, EJB, Struts etc.) and language-systems (Java, PHP, Groovy, C++) you need your “big” handy IDE tool which is used for many reasons: Inclusions of third party libs (dependency-management), trigger automatic compiles (if neccessary), automatic/safe refactorings, browsing code, debug, execute tests etc. (the list goes on forever). For that central IDE-tool [...]

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A key element for good quality software is a good automatic run test-suite, which contains both unit and integration tests. As Frederic P. Brooks already mentions in his book ‘The Mythical Man-Month’, developers (as other humans, too) are far away from being perfect. As software from the outside view often needs to be written 100% [...]

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Refactoring (changing design of existing code while preserving behaviour) is a cruicial daily software engineering practice to make your system able to adapt for typical maintenance tasks like fixing bugs or feature enhancements. Still I perceive that refactoring still is not commonly done. This article presents the most common arguments against practicing refactorings and show [...]

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Fluent interfaces is a concept that your api is closely designed to the problem area it solves and is written in the target programming language (internal DSL), so there is no language barrier from the view of client code. The goal is to make code more concise, better readable and thus easier to grasp or [...]

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