A Look At Testing
For the last 8 months I have been developing CommunityWalk out of the offices of Pivotal Computer Systems in San Francisco. They've helped me pay the bills, develop the product, and have recently given me a place to work while I try to push CommunityWalk to the next level.
Pivotal is expert when it comes to the processes around developing software. They rely heavily on agile development processes, or Extreme Programming, that takes advantage of a number of techniques including, but not limited to, Test Driven Development and Pair Programming.
Over the past few months I have been focusing my writing on Pair Programming as I learned more about it and formed many an opinion on it. Those opinions continue to evolve, so I'll continue to write about it, but I am going to start taking a harder look at testing as well now. Testing is far less controversial than Pair Programming, but still is controversial (check out this rant by a Google employee).
I certainly don't have answers to all the questions around this. The point of all of this is just to lay out some thoughts as I see them. I write as much for other people to read this stuff as for me to be able to go back and see what I was thinking at some point along the way.
Pivotal is expert when it comes to the processes around developing software. They rely heavily on agile development processes, or Extreme Programming, that takes advantage of a number of techniques including, but not limited to, Test Driven Development and Pair Programming.
Over the past few months I have been focusing my writing on Pair Programming as I learned more about it and formed many an opinion on it. Those opinions continue to evolve, so I'll continue to write about it, but I am going to start taking a harder look at testing as well now. Testing is far less controversial than Pair Programming, but still is controversial (check out this rant by a Google employee).
I certainly don't have answers to all the questions around this. The point of all of this is just to lay out some thoughts as I see them. I write as much for other people to read this stuff as for me to be able to go back and see what I was thinking at some point along the way.
posted by The Entreprexplorer | 11:47 AM
2 Comments:
My Biggest issue with XP’s Philosophy on testing is the requirement of automate testing, IMO of automated test to work properly you need a different developer to write the test, other wise the programmer uses similar code with the same logic to write the test!! If his logic is flawed the test will never catch it. If I have a different programmer write the test we’re nearly doubling out work load. For most testing I prefer to use a calculator (or excel) check my numbers
Sammy A.
XPErp.com
Sammy,
I'll be discussing some of these issues as I write about this stuff. I think that the developer needs to be conscious of the fact that the test should not use similar code to write tests. This is sometimes difficult, but I've found that situation to be the exception.
Jared
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