This week I got to work on a nice cross-section of things. Over four days I paired with three different people on three different features: a new and interesting reports tool and a couple of features on the main product. Before I worked on anything, the guys kept being very apologetic about the code and how hard it was going to be to work with… but it really wasn’t as bad as they made out. It was quite obvious which code was more recent – it was cleaner and better tested. But even the slightly older code wasn’t as bad as they said it would be.

One challenge I’d previously highlighted did show up, the fact that it’s hard to find which of the end-to-end tests and integration tests you need to run when adding a new feature. When a full suite of integration tests take 10minutes to complete it can be discouraging to run them before you make any changes. A solution that Justin and I had found came in handy. We took this solution and instead of a 10 minute integration-test run we got to the point where we could run only the relevant tests for the feature we were working on – which took 50 seconds. We’re not trying to apply this to everything straight away – we’re finding the relevant tests for the feature we’re working on and applying the solution to those as we go.

The solution in question is to use categories to ‘tag’ tests with a feature name and for those categories to be runnable. So, we can tag all the acceptance tests and integration tests relevant to users, say setting up email alerts, and run the ‘category’ as a suite. This is explained in this video about Runnable Categories.

Another good week! Everyone is open to trying new things and very capable.

I’m on holiday for the next week, so my next post on this thread will be in around two weeks. I’m going to miss being there this coming week – but I am human and I do need to have a holiday.