We’ve become complacent
Seems like there are very few developers out there practicing agile techniques. FitNesse is almost unknown in the Delphi community. While DUnit is the accepted standard for unit testing there doesn’t seem to be much talk about using it to to TDD. We have no equivalent to FxCop, NDepend or NCover for Delphi.
In short, we’re way behind the times.
Have we become stagnant? Did we give up? We used to be able to say that using Delphi we could develop products faster and more reliably than others. What happened? I don’t think that’s the case anymore. I don’t think it’s any fault of the language or vendor. I think we got stuck. Are you still writing code the same way? Fixing bugs the same way? Resonding to customer demands the same way?
If you’re still writing tightly coupled code (i.e.: business logic in GUI event handlers) you are behind the times.
If your product doesn’t have an automated test suite you’re behind the times.
If your code isn’t being continuously integrated, built and tested every day you’re behind the times.
If you can’t show how much of your code is covered by your tests you’re behind the times.
If when a defect is reported you can’t create a test case to prove and fix it you’re behind the times.
There are so many useful techniques and practices that will make our lives easier it’s hard to understand why we as a community have not embraced them.
Take this as a call to action. Throw off this systemic complacency. Choose to write better code. Educate yourself. Make your life easier by implementing the basics: Automated acceptance testing, continuous integration, TDD/BDD. The learn and implement all the practices of eXtreme programming.
Go team!
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