Loosely Coupled

I haven't had a lot to write about this month. I'm in the middle of this seemingly endless, painful cycle where the more we regression test, the more unimplemented requirements we uncover. That's right, regression testing is defining our requirement set . It's a symptom of this big rewrite I'm working on. The system has been around so long, that no one can remember every intricacy in the existing application. Regression testing is the only way to uncover the missing functionality. It's a nightmare! Compounding the problem is the difficulty in regression testing. There is a "certification" environment that is supposed to be an exact replica of production. But when we try to run production requests through our new application, the results are different. Our business users review these inconsistencies and often tell us that our responses are actually better than the production version. This is a good news/bad news type of thing. While it's...

I just listened to Kent Beck's presentation from this year's RailsConf for the second time (something I almost never do). One of the gems I loved about his presentation was when he described test driven development as "cheating" (at the 27:08 mark). Exactly! I feel a little foolish for not thinking about it about this way before. It is cheating! How many times in school did I wish I had the answers to tests before I took them? Or wished I even knew the questions? Answer: Every time. Why? Because it would've been so easy! Imagine all the time I would've saved, with assurance that my work would always be correct and complete. Extending this idea to software development should be a no brainer - figure out what the software should do ahead of time (and write tests for it). This way you know exactly what to code, when you are done, and that your solution is complete and correct. It's so easy (it feels like cheating).