Hibernating Rhinos PracticesPairing, testing and decision making
time to read 4 min | 727 words

We actually pair quite a lot, either physically (most of our stations have two keyboards & mice for that exact purpose) or remotely (Skype / Team Viewer).

2013-01-27 14.05.24 HDR

And yet, I would say that for the vast majority of cases, we don’t pair. Pairing is usually called for when we need two pairs of eyes to look at a problem, for non trivial debugging and that is about it.

Testing is something that I deeply believe in, at the same time that I distrust unit testing. Most of our tests are actually system tests. That test the system end to end. Here is an example of such a test:

[Fact]
public void CanProjectAndSort()
{
    using(var store = NewDocumentStore())
    {
        using(var session = store.OpenSession())
        {
            session.Store(new Account
            {
                Profile = new Profile
                {
                    FavoriteColor = "Red",
                    Name = "Yo"
                }
            });
            session.SaveChanges();
        }
        using(var session = store.OpenSession())
        {
            var results = (from a in session.Query<Account>()
                           .Customize(x => x.WaitForNonStaleResults())
                           orderby a.Profile.Name
                           select new {a.Id, a.Profile.Name, a.Profile.FavoriteColor}).ToArray();


            Assert.Equal("Red", results[0].FavoriteColor);
        }
    }
}

Most of our new features are usually built first, then get tests for them. Mostly because it is more efficient to get things done by experimenting a lot without having tests to tie you down.

Decision making is something that I am trying to work on. For the most part, I have things that I feel very strongly about. Production worthiness is one such scenario, and I get annoyed if something is obviously stupid, but a lot of the time decisions can fall into the either or category, or are truly preferences issues. I still think that too much goes through me, including things that probably should not.  I am trying to encourage things so I wouldn’t be in the loop so much. We are making progress, but we aren’t there yet.

Note that this post is mostly here to serve as a point of discussion. I am not really sure what to put in here, the practices we do are pretty natural, from my point of view. And I would appreciate any comments asking for clarifications.

Tweet Share Share 13 comments
Tags:

More posts in "Hibernating Rhinos Practices" series:

  1. (22 Feb 2013) A Sample Project
  2. (06 Feb 2013) Design
  3. (05 Feb 2013) Pairing, testing and decision making
  4. (04 Feb 2013) We are hiring again
  5. (31 Jan 2013) Development Workflow
  6. (30 Jan 2013) Intro