On Fri, 2002-08-16 at 21:19, Craig R. McClanahan wrote: > I've used similar pieces of XP's philosophy as well - especially the > daily integration stuff. (One example is Sun's JWSDP, where I was the > implementation architect - one of the things we did was build the entire > thing from source every night, which helped flush out a lot of potential > incompatibilities; sort of like what Gump does for open source projects > <http://jakarta.apache.org/gump/>).
I've seen it cropping up more and more. The Eclipse project is all unit test based isn't it? You can flit through the releases looking at the unit test results. > Personally, I've never been comfortable with pair programming, but that's > probably more a personal quirk than any statement about the value of the > concept. I was a bit like that at first, but now I have thought about it I can see that really my problem is really just mindset. It's not something I've tried before, but I'll give anything a go once. > One XP principle that is starting to become pervasive in Jakarta projects > is unit tests, including the notion that building tests is part of > building the code, you're not done until you've got unit tests to prove > that it works, and the idea of adding unit tests every time you fix a bug > to catch regressions. Struts itself is woefully behind the curve on this > (something I want to address after 1.1), but you'll see pretty > comprehensive JUnit based unit test suites in the source code of all the > Commons packages -- "ant test" is the usual way to invoke them. I'm sure I've seen a unit test package for Struts somewhere. It may have been on freshmeat.net if it's not something the Struts team have been working on (I mean that I may have seen it somewhere in the Jakarta website). > I've gone from a "unit tests are nice" attitude to a "unit tests are > vital" attitude based on my own experience with them. Although my experience is limited, I can very much see the benefits. Reading about the roots of XP, looking over past experiences and learning lessons prompted me to think about the way I develop software. It's not been easy, and until now I have pretty much left it in the hands of the people I have been working for at the time to lead the way (also partly a confidence thing, if I knew what I was doing I wouldn't be such a pushover). I've never got on well with the 'traditional' methods that have been forced down my throat either - I never went to university, and I did no IT at school. Everyone appears to do things differently, and most of the time the whole process feels unnatural and I feel uncomfortable with it. I've left two companies in my short history simply because I couldn't stand the way things were being done. Suicidal as that sounds in a forever fluctuating job market, for some reason I cannot let it go. Java is about the 9th programming language I've learned, and the one I have decided to stick to - it says 'all the right things' to me, and prior to that, *NIX 'said all the right things' to me - and now I use them almost exclusively. But despite that I have always had the nagging problem that I am not enjoying the tools because the development processes are too abrasive and they take the fun out of the work. If nothing else, XP appears to be a way to re-inject that. -- Regards ------------------------------------------- Cliff Rowley | [EMAIL PROTECTED] Software Engineer | www.doctype.co.uk +44 (0) 1206 514263 | www.cliffrowley.com ------------------------------------------- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
