As a big fan of TDD, I often use it, admittedly mainly in a sort of poisoned form. I am not writing all tests before writing the code. At least half of it I write after "semi-completing" a method or a bunch of methods.
These days I wanted to bring in the functionality of a third-party open source framework into code of mine. But at the beginning I was not sure if the concepts of my framework and the other one would allow a joining. Therefor it had a touch of prototyping merging some logic of the other framework into mine.
If I wrote test cases before or even during this activity, they would probably had been a waste of time, in case the joining would have not worked as I hoped. But on the other hand ensuring the correctness of the newly created logic is number one priority and most important as unknown code always is a danger for a project.
Reflecting, I am quite content with my approach not to write the tests until the current point, where I am nearly finished merging the two frameworks and see that it works in general. There is enough time for that right now, I am likely to say, although I know that some guys would raise their hands and remark about the semi-optimal appraoch chosen. An important aspect seems the experience of the developer involved in the process, from the perspective of software development in general as well as from the special perspective on the code to be extended.
Is there anyone having merged two code bases with writing test cases during or even before the merger? I would be very interested in knowing details.
No comments:
Post a Comment