Archive for the ‘unit test’ tag
The Agile Manifesto, in Plain English
Imagine yourself on a team of programmers, and you’ve just finished a new feature. What should you do next? Do you write more code, or test what you have? In the world software engineering, the philosophy that dictates what you should do next is what we call “the process”.
Every software development team has a process, even if it’s not explicitly articulated anywhere. The process tells you what you should do, how much you should do it, when you should do it, and why. Sound boring and bureaucratic? It can be, but it doesn’t have to be.
Reducing Paranoia with Unit Tests
The green bar is your friend.
Remember long division? Remember how confusing that process was to learn? With me, every long division problem was like a jigsaw puzzle wrapped in a Sudoku wrapped in a Ken-Ken.
Writing software is another activity that can be confusing and error-prone. Programming create lots of loose ends you need to keep track of. And with such a complex activity, how do you know you have arrived at the correct solution?
Enter the unit test: a software development practice designed to reduce bug paranoia and improve how well developers sleep at night.