Brian Marrick comments on Mike Clark’s blog entry Staying Fit With Learning Tests . I’m quite interested since I noticed some of my own backsliding behavior recently when I was writing code against a new API. I was writing my first JMX MBean, and had no one experienced with JMX around for guidance. I didn’t write it test first :-O
I did, however, go back and give it a full unit test suite after-the-fact, and it has been rock solid in production. It did take some refactoring to get it in shape to be easy to unit test, so the late testing step did improve the design. Anyway, back on topic: I attributed my backsliding to the fact that I was exploring/learning a new API.
I think there’s a well-known compromise between Brian and Mike’s approaches, and I’m waiting for a Smalltalker to go into more details — the Inspector. My first development job was for the Apple Newton PDA, which used a custom language called NewtonScript that had features from a number of languages (I’ll try really hard not to bore everyone with all the details, but suffice it to say that it was really a great language to program in, but I was too inexperienced to really realize it at the time).
One of the features the NewtonScript IDE copied from Smalltalk was the Inspector. I’m sure I never used it to its full potential due to being young and dumb at the time, but it allowed the sort of interactive exploration Brian is mentioning, and stored these “lessons learned” in a file that could easily be reopened and re-executed at any time. Mike’s learning tests don’t sound like they’re going to be included in the regular source tree and build process. The only reason they would be saved is to review the lesson and copy/paste some of it into the real system.
Eclipse has the concept of scrapbook pages, which are essentially renamed Inspector pages. It’s not too surprising considering Eclipse’s Visual Age roots, however, I was coding in IntelliJ IDEA so I didn’t think of a scrapbook until I read Brian’s blog. The advantage of an inspector/scrapbook page over Mike’s practice is that you don’t need the overhead of a full compilation unit. You don’t have to have a class and method in which to place executable lines of code. The ‘run’ function of the scrapbook handles that for you.
I suppose I need to explore some more nooks and crannies of IntelliJ to see if scrapbooks are available, but I had looked briefly when I first switched from Eclipse and did not find them. Perhaps it is time to file a feature request.
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