Unspace gets an audit

posted by pete on June 6th, 2008

Daniel Haran is a neat fellow: he’s lived in Paris and Montreal, he is a chocolate connoisseur, and from what we hear, an expert dancer.

He is also a Rails developer who was able to to join us at Unspace HQ in Toronto for a few weeks when we needed help on a significant milestone with the CommunityLend project. While we frequently invite guests and travelers to work out of our office, we don’t typically bring on contractors. Yet, we knew Daniel’s brother Gary Haran (another great developer - must be genetics!) and the arrangement was a good fit.

Coming back from RailsConf in Portland earlier this week, I read Daniel’s “review” of his time with us. I won’t spoil the punch line, but Daniel spoke positively of his experience. (Thanks, dude!) Specifically, it sounds like two weeks in our compound was enough for him to drink the Kool-aid and reconsider his position on the value of programmatic testing.

It’s not that we don’t test; however, we emphasize simplicity and iteration in our development. And we have a real warm, squishy human named Steph that actually loads up pages and tests them in various browsers before we consider it done. She catches things that our tests never would, because we write tests to reflect an ideal that is not reflected in reality.

I’m looking forward to Luke Francl’s talk on testing at RubyFringe. He thinks developers hide behind coverage stats (while never loading up IE) and I think he’s on to something. Programmers who boast 1:1 coverage but never look at their pages are not doing anyone any favours.