Dominic Son wrote:
There seems to be so much emphasis on testing in the Rails community. This is just food for thought...
Kreitzberg and Shneiderman
* Testing by itself does not improve software quality.
That discusses big-bang testing, by a QA crew, at the end of an iteration. And you can bet the iteration was longer than one week. Rails and other "agile" projects rely on tests written by the same engineers who write the features.
I myself don't think that endless debugging improves quality very much, so I add tests as I go, and if they fail unexpectedly, I have the option to Revert back to the last state where all tests pass. Oh, and naturally we configure a rake submit command that only commits code to SVN if it first passes a test run.
Quality skyrockets, and the tests themselves are just part of the system. It's how you use the tests that count.
If you want to improve your software, don't test more; develop better.
Oh, if I want higher quality, I need to raise my quality. Gotcha!