Stephen Eley wrote:
Ben and Rick,
Thanks very much to both of you for the encouraging responses. Your
reply, Ben, came just in time as I was starting to wonder if I had
made a complete and irrevocable ass of myself.
On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 10:36 AM, Ben Mabey<b...@benmabey.com> wrote:
In general though I don't know if I
really see all of this as a problem specific to RSpec. The problem is that
many people coming to RSpec are not just RSpec novices but are in fact TDD
novices (and Rails, and Ruby novices too boot at times as well!).
FWIW, I agree totally. In fact I re-read my message last night, and I
want to retract one of my statements for sure: the statement that
RSpec makes "some easy things easy, but other easy things very
complicated."
On deeper thought, I don't believe this is true. RSpec doesn't make
anything harder than it already is. There's nothing _wrong_ with
RSpec in this sense. I think a more incisive statement would be that
with RSpec, some complicated things _feel like they should be easier._
If only because other things feel so easy. And newbies tend to
confront those problem areas at a point in the growth curve where the
complexity can be misinterpreted as them Just Not Getting It. Some
are driven off as a result.
You're right about practice. You're right that bringing together too
many learning curves at once creates interference patterns that
shouldn't be blamed on RSpec. And Rick's reference to Martin Fowler's
spiked learning curve -- "this is scary, this is nifty, WHOOPS I
overdid it, this is okay in its place" -- is an excellent point.
But I don't think it's totally out-of-bounds to frame it as an "RSpec
problem," even if it isn't RSpec's fault. The thing is... Well...
There are *opportunities* here. If RSpec -- along with its tools and
resources and culture -- was a little better at some of this stuff,
how much easier would it be to learn *everything else?*
How many of us learned BDD at the same time we learned programming?
...Show of hands? Anyone? The only developers who could make that
claim would have to be pretty fresh out of the pond. If that does
apply to anyone reading this, please speak up -- I'd like to hear your
thoughts on how you're doing.
How many of us used TDD or BDD out of the gate when we learned Rails
or Ruby? This is plausible, but I get the sense it's uncommon. Most
of us don't even think to work on good testing practices until we
believe we're getting the rest of the stuff down. I know I didn't.
When learning a new technology I generally don't bother with testing let
alone TDD (unless I think TDD could help the learning process). It is
like spiking and most of the stuff you are creating is throw-away code
that won't need to be maintained. There are times, like this, where
testing isn't needed IMO. But that isn't really your question is it..
You're wondering what effect teaching good testing practices up front
would bring... I've wondered this my self at times (in fact I'm helping
prepare an intro rails course now and wresting with this very issue) and
it seems like teaching good testing to people who don't even know OO can
be like jumping in to the deep end of the pool.
Formal education in programming doesn't help. Not by any evidence to
my eyes. I've recently started seeing someone who's majoring in CS at
a well-known university, and he said the first class he took on
software design was in C. Frickin' *C*. _Then_ they did C++, and
then Java, but there was nothing significant about testing. I told
him about Cucumber and it made his heart go pitter-patter.
I hear this complaint quite often and FWIW it is an untrue stereotype
IME. While I was at the university I was taught testing, design
patterns, refactoring, Agile methodologies, pair programming, use cases,
CI, etc... In fact the first time I heard about TDD was in my first
Java class where the professor would TDD all of his work in the lectures
(live coding!). We did team projects where we had a CI server setup and
we were required to have tests and do pair programming at least part of
the time. We also had class projects where different teams would create
different components and we had to work out our communication protocols,
touch points, and integrate it all. Anyways, I justed wanted to throw
that out and say that formal education isn't totally failing like some
people claim it is. Only my "Software Engineering" courses taught and
encouraged these practices, but I was still taught them.
The teaching resources for Rails and Ruby don't help. Just about
every book makes a *nod* toward testing -- there's always a chapter,
they always say "do this constantly" -- but the chapter's inevitably
somewhere near the back, after everything else has been introduced.
Rails culture is passionate about testing, but most of us don't start
to tap into that culture until we're at 'Competent' or above.
What if the world were different? What if teaching were different?
What if the predominant lessons people used to get started with Rails
*did not* start with "Type 'rails', make a scaffold, watch it fly!"
but instead started with, "What's the most important single piece of
information in your app? Okay, great. Write a spec like this. Now
open up this file in /app/models.. [...] Your spec passed, you're
cooking! Now let's spec a view so we can see that information... Now
let's spec a controller to bring them together..."
(Even better would be to start with Cucumber, which would take up very
little extra overhead in that type of tutorial.)
So... From what I have seen people with little experience testing are
able to pick up the notion of integration/acceptance testing a lot
faster than object level testing. So, I do think having a tutorial
drive all the features out with Cucumber or just webrat+some testing
framework isn't far fetched at all. Object level examples are a
different story though IME...
You get the gist. What if learning Rails was *all about* learning
BDD? Would it make the Rails stuff easier to understand and develop
competence faster? I hypothesize that it would.
Some things need to be easier in BDD before we can get there. To me
that means things need to be easier in RSpec. I believe my tutorial
above would be easy enough to do today on the model side, but it's
just too cumbersome to write a view or controller spec. You lose that
"holy crap look how *fast* this is coming!" vibe which is so
invigorating when you're doing something new. We could make that
tutorial happen when writing a controller spec takes about as long as
writing the controller *code.* There are some mitigators for this --
the Shoulda macros may be great for this now that they work with RSpec
-- but even so I think it's probably a little bit of wading into the
swamp.
I would like to see that world. I'd like to help *make* it. That
college guy I'm dating has asked me about learning Rails -- but I'm
planning to talk his ass off about Cucumber and RSpec before I agree
to help him with code. I'm hoping he'll be my experiment to test my
hypothesis, and I'll get a better sense of just how easy or hard it is
to learn agile Web development if BDD happens at the ground floor.
Given time, I think the patterns facilitated by RSpec could
*completely* revolutionize the way software happens everywhere, *if*
the next generation of developers come to learn it first and not as an
"add-on." And that's why I'm picking on RSpec. I can't think of any
other technology in a better position to make this happen, with only
some moderate shifts of emphasis in both the tools and the culture.
Does anyone else think that'd be pretty cool?
Yeah, I think having such resources available would be very cool. The
most common complaint I hear in IRC rooms is that there is no good
sample rails app that makes good use of RSpec and Cucumber. I think
there are some examples out there, but an app built as a tutorial would
be much more helpful with the proper git tags and such. I mentioned
before that I was helping prepare a rails course. This is with my local
Ruby group and we have started on a tutorial app:
http://github.com/urug/media_lender/tree/master
It thought it would be cool to use this project and BDD all the way
through and teach it like that. However, I have other commitments so
other people in the group will probably do most of the work without
BDD... It is something I would like to revisit someday and provide such
an app. Have you started on a tutorial app like this yet?
-Ben
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