GrowingAgilePractices2004 Identifying Ways to Promote a more Agile Workplace.

Topic: How to make developers adopt testing

Initiator: Siamack Farshi

Participants: Lee McCallum?, Siamack Farshi

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Discussion Summary:

Developers have to be educated on how testing will help them develop code more effectively, and the environment in which they develop must promote quality coding practices.

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Conclusions / Proposals / Actions:

• Wet their appetite:
  • A before and after working example. (ie. Design improvement)
  • Demonstrate ease of change. Have a meeting with developers to show how easy it is to add a new feature (including refactoring the code to facilitate the addition of this new feature).
• Traditional developers should be responsible for maintaining their own code, otherwise they won't be motivated to write tests. That is, if a developer writes code independently, they should not be allowed to just pass it to someone else to maintain.
• Make writing tests easy
  • Issues:
    • Rewards not immediate
    • Lack of integrated testing framework. For example, setting up a testing framework for a J2EE/Struts? application is difficult.
• Write a small set of tests that exercise the core functionality of the system. Integrate this suite into the build scripts so that they are run daily, and make the developers that check in code that breaks the core functionality fix it.

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Post-Meeting Discussion:

Suggestion: if you decide to take this discussion offline to a newsgroup, please indicate the location of the group here so others can join you.