I had a small task to build a subversion post-commit trigger. I didn't know my way around the subversion library, and so I started spiking... the old way. I fired up an interactive session and tried playing with it. I created a repo by hand and started running merges and copies and checkins, and had the trigger print stuff out. There is Nothing wrong with doing that, by the way.
The problem was that I didn't toss it out and TDD the new one into existence. I TDDed my way through any new routines, and extracted-n-tested any tricky bits until my main loop was much smaller, but I didn't toss it and TDD it back into existence. I kept the prototype.
As a result, I have this code that's pretty simple and nice, and there in the middle is this post-coding-tested wart. It works, it passed code review, but I'm not going to put this one up on my fridge. The routine has a triply-nested loop and is at least a dozen lines long. It's disgraceful. Worse yet, the tests are hard to read because of the deep structure.
First chance, I'm rewriting that thing. I have to recover some professional pride.
No comments:
Post a Comment