[LRUG] Details for your cuketober meeting

Hakan Şenol Ensari hakan.ensari at papercavalier.com
Sat Oct 9 02:28:07 PDT 2010


It's probably been over a year since I started cuking, and I've hit (and
partly overcome) two blockers so far:

On the creative level:

I fiddle around a lot when building, especially in the initial stages.
Exploring is *expensive* when you do proper BDD.

Even something seemingly superficial as changing the name of a selector may
mean you have to edit a step or two that depend on that selector. More
profound changes are even more cumbersome to retrofit in the tests.

The redoubled work load works against the creative impulse: Imagine
sketching something and then having to leaf through your book to a different
page to update a model every time your sketch took a new, unexpected turn.
Not to overdramatize, but this slowly but surely kills the creative process.

So it dawned on me some days ago:

http://twitter.com/#!/hakanensari/status/25436965531

I know you could say this would not happen in a larger shop where programmer
is not product owner is not front-end guy and designs are well-thought-out
in advance and not refactored ad hoc. I hear you.

So that's one. The second blocker is more menial:

Once your application starts growing out of the classical-Rails-app clothes,
it becomes progressively more time-consuming to figure out the tools and
steps to even be able to start testing. The primary bad boy I have in mind
is JavaScript. Johnson and envjs made my day early this summer when we found
out about them, but now, having switched to 1.9.2, I am groping again in the
dark until the guys maintaining Johnson catch up.

I was at Joseph's (great) RailsConf talk where he passingly mentioned the
honeymoon period of testing with a smile and then moved on to the
two-children-and-a-mortgage crisis of how to distribute your cuke horde
across multiple Amazon instances to have CI finish in a reasonable amount of
time. I just felt I should pitch in to talk about the honeymoon here.

Hakan

http://hakanensari.com
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