Confessions of an IT Manager_Phil Factor

Section III: Software Projects: the Good, the Bad and the Pitiful 159
On the Trail with the Cowboy
Coders
First published 24 October 2007
Testing code before you release it? Who would have
thought of such a thing? Is there no end to what Agile
Programming can do? Phil is, once again, left
shaking his head in disbelief.
One of the signs of increasing age in the IT industry is a frequent and acute
sense of 'déjà vu'. New things that are laboriously explained to you ring all sorts
of bells. The past flashes before one's eyes.
I recently visited a company developing Internet-based applications. They
were proud of their progressiveness and explained to me that they developed
database systems using the radical new Agile XP (Extreme Programming)
methodology. Wow, I thought. That must have impressed the shareholders.
Perhaps they don't realize that Agile XP is known in the industry as 'Cowboy
Coding'.
I feigned ignorance, which is not usually hard for me to do.
"Well," said my genial and pleasant host, "One of the great things
about Agile XP is that you test every part of your code as soon as
you've written it. XP uses what it calls 'Unit Tests'. These are
automated tests that test the code. The programmer will try to write as
many tests as they can think of that might break the code they are
writing; if all tests run successfully then the coding is complete, and the
programmer can then go on to develop more code. Flaws in the system
are easily communicated by writing a unit test that proves a certain
piece of code will break."
"Gosh! You mean you test your code rather than just write it?"
"Ingenious, isn't it? When writing code, the unit test provides direct
feedback as to how the system reacts to the changes one has made. If,
for instance, the changes affect a part of the system that is not in the
scope of the programmer who made them, that programmer will not
notice the flaw. There is a large chance that this bug will appear when
the system is in production."