Subj : Re: extreme programming (thoughts)
To   : comp.programming,comp.software.extreme-programming,comp.software-eng
From : matt
Date : Thu Jul 21 2005 09:50 pm

> Those are all very healthy indicators. Maybe this XP thing isn't sucking
> after all.

i think the way i wrote that was confusing -- it takes about 12 seconds
to execute the 5 tests. writing them (and the sql tests, and the gui
tests) took a couple days.

i stand by my original post -- xp, as it is known at my organization,
is not an attractive solution to me thus far. i am still in the
learning curve, so perhaps i am not an ideal judge. but....the amount
of time ive spent writing test cases for this very simple data
retrieval & binding control is insane. this is a task which i could
wrap up in a couple of hours. as part of that time, i would have error
handling & error logging. i just find it very hard to believe that *if*
there were any bugs w/ my control, it would have taken more time to
debug & fix it than i spent writing tests. whats more, we must double
that time, since there were two of us -- would it really take me *four
days* to debug a problem in this control!? of course not.

now multiply this for every control, every peice of code everywhere.
adding up all those (double) man hours, i simply cant imagine QA &
future debug time being as expensive as development+test time. theres
no way. in all my years of webdev, ive just never had to spend that
kind of time on debugging.

but like i said, i develop financial loan application websites -- not
powergrids. maybe the manhours spent on this testing are more useful to
serious apps, because the code i see in my industry seems to get
re-written every few years anyway.......


matt

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