Re: Agility without testability

Let's cut to the chase:

Automated testing provides consistent, repeatable, objective, fast feedback
so that we can make reliably steady progress towards our goals.  If human
feedback alone was sufficient, pair programming would allow us to make
steady progress towards our goals reliably enough.  Without automated
testing, we would not be doing XP.

This kind of feedback would be very useful for working in any domain, but it
is impractical in most domains, so I just do not see how digging into why it
is useful buys us very much.

In porting XP outside of software development, we must create or find an
analog to automated testing, or develop or choose a different approach.

Many domains have found this need and developed simulation environments that
facilitate defining acceptance criteria, creating solutions, and verifying
how solutions perform against those criteria.  Of course, the work still has
to be deployed from the simulation environment and tested in the real
world.  Whenever something worked in the test environment, but not in the
real world, then there is a bug in the simulation environment that should be
worked around or fixed (hopefully, in the XP style of creating a failing
test that represents the bug, and then making the test pass).

If Bill's target domain does not have suitable simulation environments, then
the choice is between building a suitable simulation environment first,
stumbling around in the domain trying doing XP-- without automated tests, or
looking at different approaches.

Am I making the issue too simple?

Steven Gordon

On 6/30/07, Amir Kolsky <kolsky <at> actcom.net.il> wrote:
>
>   > > Why do we do automatic tests in XP? What does it buy us?
> > It supports continuous integration and allows rapid releases.
> >
> > It affords trust for shared ownership.
> >
> > It distributes and underpins tacit domain knowledge.
> >
> > It helps insure against rollback of shipped features.
>
> OK, so lets start with the first two..
>
> WHY do we want continuous integration and rapid releases?
> WHY do we want shared ownership?
>
> Amir Kolsky
> Net Objectives
> Lean, Agile, TDD
>
> P.S., This is a serious response. The Automated Testing practice in XP is
> good because it if you do it you win some things. I am trying to find out,
> with you, what these things are and see whether they are applicable to
> your
> situation.
>
>  
>

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