> On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 3:45 PM, Gareth Townsend <[email protected]> > wrote: >> For a less Ranty topic maybe something along the lines of: >> "Testing is the hardest part of development"
Actually this I tend to agree with this, but not so much because it's hard but because it's hard to do it well. Here's the most common objection I get to writing tests: "So I wrote the code in 15 mins and tried it out and it works but now I have to spend 30 mins writing tests... what was the point of all this again?" OK, most of you are probably throwing things at your screens right now but I've heard that before and experienced the fustration when I was very new to rspec et al. Yes, when you test first and you're fluent in rspec and your chosen mocking framework you can write the tests and the code in 20 mins flat, but until you get there... there's not as much of a (buzzword alert) ROI on automated tests (sorry!). So, how do you get yourself/your teammates to perservere with the learning curve until you reach that zen/enlightenment stage of testing? We all know it's worth it, and sure there's the "you must eat your all your vegetables before you can have any desert" approach (i.e. complain loudly on the bugtracker), but unless you get (another buzzword) buy-in from teammates/management it doesn't work so well.. I think I'm rambling now but I think (at least for me) what makes testing hard is not testing itself, it's testing *productively* and *getting new-to-testing developers who don't know (beyond the testing mantra) why they should bother to test* which is most difficult. Anyway, I can't actually attend any roro meetings/debates so feel free to ignore me :) Also, compared to this audience I'm a relatively young pup in the ruby world, so please feel free to turn your nose up at my naive ramblings... but I felt like adding my 2c. Robert -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby or Rails Oceania" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rails-oceania?hl=en.
