Rapid Cycle Testing

I'm still experimenting with TDD, and the  jury  is  still  out.  As with so many religious wars, I suspect the best advice is to strive for balance.

But one thing that I'm completely sold on is Rapid Cycle Testing.  (Not to be confused with Short Time Horizon Designing, which I'm *not* sold on.)  To the degree that you *do* write automated tests, they should be executed frequently.  How frequently?  Well...

• How about once per release cycle, right before code freeze?
• How about once a week?
• How about once a day, as part of the "nightly" build?
• How about several times a day, as part of each developer build?

or

• How about every time you save a source file from your editor?

Working with Clojure and Midje's autotest has sold me on that last one.  It is only practical for simple tests which execute very quickly, but so far that is what most of my unit tests have turned out to be.


Ruby

Being somebody who enjoys learning new things, I decided to do some Ruby learning.  When I learn a new thing, I like to experiment and take notes.  I have files named "learning_lisp.txt" and more recently "learning_clojure.txt".  These files have small examples of source code with minimal explanation; they aren't intended to be useful for somebody else, but only to trigger my memory.  In particular, they show the results of my experiments.

The other day I saw this post, in which the author describes writing unit tests as he learns Ruby.   This made complete sense to me, and I wish I had seen that post a year ago!  Now that I'm learning Ruby, my notes file is "learning_ruby.rb" ... ".rb" instead of ".txt".  My experiments are entered in there instead of just typed interactively in a REPL.  I've only just started, and I'm not sure if I'll stick with it, but I really like the idea of having my notes file be executable; if nothing else, it catches my typos.

Unfortunately, Ruby doesn't have a Midje-like autotest that I know of, so I wrote my own.  I'm sure this will need to evolve significantly over time, especially as I work on larger projects, but here's my "start small" approach.  Note that this is Unix-centric (I use it on my Mac):

    fswatch  -i "\.rb$" -e ".*" . | xargs -n1 ./test1.sh

where "test1.sh" contains little more than:

    echo "========================================="
    ruby $*
    date

Note, I don't think fswatch comes with Mac out of the box.  I used Homebrew's:

    brew install fswatch

I love this setup!  I have my "learning_ruby.rb" file in my editor and my Ruby book open.  I see a new function, and I enter a couple of experiments in my ".rb" file and save it.  The "fswatch" window immediately runs it and shows me the results.  Talk about instant gratification!