[Nottingham] [Misc] 23/04/2020 follow-on and 14/05/2020 discussion thoughts

[J J]

We call that "Test Driven Development". It works really well when you know
what you want to achieve.
It can, at times, lead down a rabbit hole of spending too long maintaining
tests as requirements or design change.
But it very definitely does have a place.

J.

On Fri, 15 May 2020 at 17:52, Martin via Nottingham <
nottingham at mailman.lug.org.uk> wrote:

> On 15/05/2020 08:32, J J wrote:
> > The rapidly dwindling sanity of Valve programmers as expressed through
> > code comments
> > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k238XpMMn38
> >
> > J.
>
> Looks like a desperate overnight hack to get something to show for a
> next morning demo...!
>
> Thanks for that giggle :-)
>
>
> Scarily, how much more of that type of stuff is rushed out for the sake
> of arbitrary deadlines from desperate greedy management and the
> time-for-coding and testing be damned?...
>
> Yep, seen too much of that.
>
>
> In stark contrast, in the long ago past, I did see a beautiful example
> where a 'must work first time' system was put together where the system
> had planned-in design for test from the outset. Separately, test code
> was written to exercise the entire system section-by-section and finally
> fully end-to-end. Importantly, the tests were blindly written from the
> /design spec/ .
>
> I got a complaint from the dept manager as to why that job 'looked
> bigger'...
>
> True enough, the job went through to product first time and saved
> (avoided) a few weeks of (difficult, expensive,) post-product 'iteration'.
>
> An unexpected positive side effect was that the /design spec itself/ was
> in effect debugged by the aspect of having the validation code written
> blindly /from the spec/ ...
>
>
> Some good fun that seems to be repeatedly forgotten or stupidly ignored.
>
>
> Cheers,
> Martin
>
> --
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> Nottingham at mailman.lug.org.uk
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