Categories
General nonsense

4-8-15-16-23-42…

…09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0.

Categories
Agile

The Way of Testivus

From the slightly-odd The Way of Testivus, via InfoQ:

The pupil asked the master programmer:
“When can I stop writing tests?”

The master answered:
“When you stop writing code.”

The pupil asked:
“When do I stop writing code?”

The master answered:
“When you become a manager.”

The pupil trembled and asked:
“When do I become a manager?”

The master answered:
“When you stop writing tests.”

The pupil rushed to write some tests.
He left skid marks.

If the code deserves to be written,
it deserves to have tests.

Categories
Agile Rails Ruby

Are we spending more and more time writing tests?

A while ago I wrote about testing trivialities, and claimed that no matter how simple the piece of code is, it still ought to have a test. I followed it up with some thoughts on using a helper to simplify writing specs for common validations. Even using the helper, the actual test code for a single validation outweighs the production code by a factor of more than three:

Categories
Rants

I hate British Summer Time

No, not the season – the clock change. The bizarre anachronistic ritual of spending six months of the year pretending that it’s an hour later than it really is.

Categories
General nonsense

Shutdown Day

Shutdown Day Tomorrow is Shutdown Day.

Can you survive for 24 hours without switching on your computer?

[Update] I managed. Did you?

Categories
Rants

Gratuitous rant

Why on earth do politicians and the media keep banging on about “carbon emissions,” “carbon trading,” “carbon-neutral” and so on, when they’re actually talking about carbon dioxide? It drives me mad!

There, that feels better. I’m going to relax now with a nice glass of hydrogen.

Categories
Agile Java Rails Ruby Software

cruisecontrol.rb

In case you missed it, those nice people at ThoughtWorks released CruiseControl.rb yesterday.

Categories
Agile Rails Ruby

DRYing out model specs

[Updated 14/3/07: corrected specify_attributes as per Paul’s comment]
[Updated 18/12/07: modified to avoid crazy RSpec errors]

A week or so ago I wrote about writing specs for simple pieces of functionality (particularly those that are arguably just configuration, like Rails validations). I argued that it’s important to test-drive even the simple things – however, the amount of test code can get out of hand.

Categories
Agile Ruby Software

Testing trivialities … and double-entry bookkeeping

From time to time I end up in a discussion (as often as not with myself) about the point at which something is so trivial that it doesn’t justify creating a unit test (or behaviour spec, in more BDD-like language).

Categories
Agile General nonsense

InfoQ interview Mary and Tom Poppendieck about Lean

See the video here.

I’ll get round to watching the whole thing eventually, but first, use the link underneath the video to skip to “What are some of the other principles of Lean?”

I never realised that Tom Poppendieck was such an accomplished ventriloquist!