Coding Without a Net

ruby, software development, test driven development

I knew better, but despite that I decided to follow along with Agile Web Development with Rails without doing TDD. Anyway as I noted in an earlier post you don’t get to the testing section until about 150 pages in.

Apparently I was luckier than usual as I didn’t run into any show stoppers before getting to the testing chapter. Then I had some hard drive corruption and I had to recover from a backup. I ended up losing some of my code, but I just jumped back in test free. Of course I fell on my face doing the old, code check in browser routine.

Made a little error with the shopping cart class that I just couldn’t track down (something about a nil class). After about an hour of thrashing, I jumped backwards to writing unit tests around it. Within half an hour I found my logic error courtesy of a typo.

So I’m making better, faster progress now because I’m writing tests around everything. In the future even for wading through sample code, I’m requiring myself to do TDD. Slower is faster.

Ed Gibbs @ April 3, 2006