Friday, April 03, 2009

Second-class Citizens

I hear a lot recently that Test Code should not be treated as Second-class Citizen, that it is important, that is more important than the production code itself since it grows our confidence that we can re-work any piece of functionality without disastrous result in validation, etc.

Everybody seems now to know about the topic, although not everybody, not always tries to put the idea into practice: refactor test suites, use patterns when building them, create them when appropriate, make them robust, easy to extend, make them most suited for testing the current application, etc.

In my working experience I see a lot of other, not commonly known, hidden, Second-class Citizens.

I see: huge build files , production code labeled as "GUI" or "View" or "DB" part that is left to slowly rotten, javascript files, css files, xsl files, xml files, html files, resource files, etc. I can tell you for sure that all this buddies have one thing in common: toghether will affect every quality aspect appliable to your product!

Grow the monsters and you'll find yourself in big trouble. Sometimes you'll say: no, we can't do that, the "delete" feature breaks all our architecture, sometimes you'll just notice that every screen in your app looks different, sometimes you'll notice that any fix you perform, generates 3 more bugs!

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