Comments on: Do you have enough oil? http://andypalmer.com/2009/03/do-you-have-enough-oil/ Views on software, technology, consulting and business process Sun, 31 Jan 2010 16:31:55 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 hourly 1 By: Rob Myers http://andypalmer.com/2009/03/do-you-have-enough-oil/comment-page-1/#comment-898 Rob Myers Tue, 28 Apr 2009 23:05:11 +0000 http://andypalmer.com/?p=58#comment-898 Perfect analogy! I just gave a talk last night on the business value of TDD and particularly refactoring, and I find that--in order to get real buy-in--I've had to finish this particular talk with three actual first-person stories about how the team I was on turned a sudden, surprising, and "architecturally challenging" story into over $100,000/year savings or revenue in a matter of days. I know for a fact that all three of those would have ended in disappointment if we hadn't been completely covered with fast, automated regression tests, or hadn't been refactoring with a very low tolerance for subtle code-smells. (That was one point of the talk I aimed at developers: On a TDD team, you're not refactoring messy code, you're cleaning CLEAN code. Like a sushi kitchen, you never leave it even a little messy.) Perfect analogy!

I just gave a talk last night on the business value of TDD and particularly refactoring, and I find that–in order to get real buy-in–I’ve had to finish this particular talk with three actual first-person stories about how the team I was on turned a sudden, surprising, and “architecturally challenging” story into over $100,000/year savings or revenue in a matter of days. I know for a fact that all three of those would have ended in disappointment if we hadn’t been completely covered with fast, automated regression tests, or hadn’t been refactoring with a very low tolerance for subtle code-smells. (That was one point of the talk I aimed at developers: On a TDD team, you’re not refactoring messy code, you’re cleaning CLEAN code. Like a sushi kitchen, you never leave it even a little messy.)

]]> By: Steve C http://andypalmer.com/2009/03/do-you-have-enough-oil/comment-page-1/#comment-168 Steve C Sat, 21 Mar 2009 03:24:17 +0000 http://andypalmer.com/?p=58#comment-168 Maybe even more notable, at sxsw I went to a panel on scaling webapps and was given this exact line of reasoning by some obviously competent dev leads from successful internet companies. "We're a startup. We're resource-constrained. We don't have time to write tests". I don't want to ridicule these people - you have your set of experiences and you can't have absorbed everything the development world has to offer. But we know that we write tests precisely because we're time-constrained. I think this should get more emphasis than it does: a well-crafted, fast-running unit test suite is an incredibly powerful productivity tool. If your time horizons are > 1 month, your team will spend a punishing amount of time reorienting the codebase to accommodate changes and new features if correctness must be proven at human-using-a-browser speed. For a modern startup it could very well mean death. Maybe even more notable, at sxsw I went to a panel on scaling webapps and was given this exact line of reasoning by some obviously competent dev leads from successful internet companies. “We’re a startup. We’re resource-constrained. We don’t have time to write tests”.

I don’t want to ridicule these people – you have your set of experiences and you can’t have absorbed everything the development world has to offer.

But we know that we write tests precisely because we’re time-constrained. I think this should get more emphasis than it does: a well-crafted, fast-running unit test suite is an incredibly powerful productivity tool. If your time horizons are > 1 month, your team will spend a punishing amount of time reorienting the codebase to accommodate changes and new features if correctness must be proven at human-using-a-browser speed. For a modern startup it could very well mean death.

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