I was in a project design review pre-meeting, and we were going over the features we already had, and we got to the change control process.  The first thing on the change control process was 'Unit Tests'.

Unit Tests?  We don't even have a good functional test suite, and he says we're doing unit tests!?

Basically, on the SEI model, our group is very solidly a 1 on functional testing, and we have no testing harness, let alone one capable of doing unit tests.  I'd recently proposed a design for a SEI level 2 functional test suite, which would be fairly easy to bump up to level 3 with a little documentation.  This same person had asked the questions, "Do we need this?" and "Do we have time to do it?"

I found it very humorous that they were worried a little later that we were SEI level 1 on design - if we can't tell where we are with any reliability, what does it matter if we cannot reliably figure out how to move forward?  I'd suggest that we cannot improve on our design until we improve on our testing.

Later, I found that "we" also do refactoring, and many other extreme programming practices.  I was given the evidence of some email traffic, where I described some changes I was making as 'refactoring'.  This disregards the facts that I'm the only one who does, and that I only get time to do it as part of bug fixes or new work.

I suspect the one I liked best was Paired Programming.  Our group is spread out across the country, with people who do not have coworkers within many miles.  How could we be doing Paired Programming?

Sigh

Current Mood: aggravated