We have been presented with different types of methodologies for developing a project/ program, one of the most common used is the waterfall methodology where when you finish a task you continue to the other one until you have pass all the stages and then you are done, the problem with this method is that you never go back to previous stages and see if they are some failures, making this the most dangerous type of methodology.
In the podcast call Test && Commit || Revert, Kent Beck discuss a new type of workflow, call «test && commit» , the main idea is to test every new piece of code that you want to add to your program, if it passes the test then you can commit it, but if it doesn´t then you have to discard all the changes till the last commit that pass satisfactorily the tests, not try to fix it or make some changes, but really delete it, erased it, take it to the trash.
Deleting the code that took you a decent amount of time to make might sound rough, and you might be wondering that why I’m not allow to make some mistakes and try to fix them, well the same question occurred to Kent Beck, and also made him question if someone could really program this way, and the answer as surprising as it sound was YES!! you can!! the way this methodology works is that it pushes you to find a different path that you had already imagine. By doing this it allows you to find even a better way to code your program giving you the chance of exploring you options and your skills as a programmer.
In my own personal opinion I think that the best thing to do if something is not working the way it supposed too then you have to find another way to make it happend, dont be stuborn and try to fix or solve something that is an death end, you should try going to another path, maybe the new path you find could resolve the issue you’ve been dealing with for a hole month 😛
See you next time!!!
Software Quality and Testing 