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Showing posts from July, 2010

Make it or break it

Some times I am working on a project alone doing both design, planning, programming and testing. I have found it useful to separate these different kinds of work as much as possible. That's because programmers are not good testers. Programming and testing requires totally opposite mindsets: Success as a programmer is to get something to work (make it) Success as a tester is to find something that doesn't work (break it) If I start testing while I'm in programming mode, I will not try very hard to break it, so lots of errors will slip through. But on the other hand, I can easily get into programming from testing. When I am testing, I am working with an example, and the example helps me to focus my programming. But I try to avoid jumping from programming to testing anyway, because it is hard to get back to effective testing again. 1. Design I get the best results if I start with designing a few examples of how the functionality will be used. The examples help me to focus and