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use make and version control system for every project?

Peter Hansen peter at engcorp.com
Wed Oct 8 17:39:05 EDT 2003 
Ian Bicking wrote:
> 
> On Wednesday, October 8, 2003, at 12:47 PM, Peter Hansen wrote:
> > None of this is to place blame, per se, but merely to ensure that
> > our process receives periodic scrutiny so we can improve it when
> > it fails us.  If the person who checked in the buggy code didn't
> > work with a partner, we need to fix that.  If the partners who
> > checked in the buggy code didn't test adequately, we need to fix
> > that.  If the customer didn't write an acceptance test that
> > covered this potential problem, we need to fix that.
> 
> Customers writing acceptance tests?  You must have very educated,
> thoughtful customers.  

Extreme Programming, of course.  I should perhaps have written 
"Customer" instead of merely "customer", which is the convention XP
uses to suggest that this might not be the end user, but could
be an "internal customer" who represents the end user, perhaps the
product manager or such.  Even a software manager, if that's the best 
you've got and that person is identified by the business as having
authority to set priorities and to define requirements.

> Even if they are just descriptions, not
> automated tests, I don't frequently come upon non-programmers (or maybe
> a project manager) that can thoroughly and formally describe what would
> constitute an acceptance test.  Even among programmers and project
> managers it's more often a developing skill, not a well-honed skill.

And nobody ever said that the Customer literally has to code the tests
herself.  She should be paired with one of the programmers, who will
work with her to implement the tests using the appropriate testing
framework.

With an adequate test framework, even a fairly non-technical Customer
could learn to write decent acceptance tests for a variety of things.

-Peter
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