Presented here is a quick analysis of the advertised daily rates for contract roles in London for the three major programming languages used in the finance industry: Java, C# and C++. The analysis is based on data scraped from the leading IT job site in the UK on 24 October 2010.

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Checking for expected exceptions is a fundementally important aspect of unit testing. Testing exceptional conditions is just as important as testing the happy-path of a method’s logic. Unfortunately, even in best of projects people take shortcuts. In code coverage reports it is very common to see chunks of red highlighting little if/throw code blocks. Often this will be glossed over in a code review, or ignored by your programming pair. Take a look through the project you are working on at the moment to see what the state of your exception checking is.

Junit 4.7 has improved functionality for testing exceptions, above and beyond that added in Junit 4, so it is only getting easier to test these situations. This article demonstrates the common practices for checking expected exceptions using JUnit, including using Junit 4.7′s ExpectedException and creating custom Hamcrest Matcher instances.

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