David Putman

I was at a customer site not so long ago giving a course on Agile Software Development and part of the course was an introduction to test-driven development. (TDD) TDD is a process whereby the requirements are specified as a set of tests and the developers use the number of tests passing, or failing, to measure the amount of progress in the system. In the middle of one of my talks, the head of testing rose from his seat and asked; "So you′re saying that we should let the developers know what the tests are before they even start coding?" After I replied in the affirmative he responded with, "That would be cheating! If we did that, the developers would then only write code to pass the tests!" That particular manager′s opinion is one I′ve found to be reasonably common among testers and it′s one I′ve always found difficult to understand. There seems to be a general rule in some organisations that once the requirements have been captured, there should be no comm...

We′ve all seen that scene in the movie where the family all gather round to hear the reading of the will. As the solicitor reads each name aloud, the expression on the corresponding face is a signal as to how welcome the bequest is to the recipient A smile, a gasp of pleasant surprise or, maybe, a frown of disappointment. A legacy is something that is left or given by someone who is now at a distance, making communication with the donor difficult. It is also an ′aide-memoire′, something to remember them by. Recently though, the term ′legacy code′ has come to mean code which is difficult to work on, partly because it can be difficult to communicate with the originator of the code but mostly because it is difficult to communicate with the code itself. This strikes me as strange because that is the very essence of the programmer′s task. We are not ′problem-solvers′, as some would have it. Calculating the V.A.T on an invoice or working out how...