

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Just Fix Tests - markazevedo
http://engineering.bookrenter.com/actually-upgrading-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-w

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abc_lisper
I had the exact same revelation two weeks ago, and surprisingly that is almost
the same phrase I tell myself :).

~~~
markazevedo
You know, after 2 failed upgrade attempts to Rails 3... we eventually came to
the understanding that we shouldn't attempt to simultaneously make
"improvements". Because without a green test suite, we had no idea if the
failures were new or upgrade related. That was the cause of 99% of worry until
we said "fuck it, let's just fix everything first."

~~~
abc_lisper
My revelation came from more simpler stuff. I was programming some service at
work, and as usual there were a lot of bugs. I tend to worry a lot during
programming about corner cases etc. I analyzed myself analyzing, and thought
may be this is what a computer should do, which is inline with an earlier
epiphany that "It is cardinal sin of a developer to do himself what a computer
can do".

Now I tend not to worry about corner cases etc while programming. I just write
all the stuff I can, and write tests for all the stuff that could possibly go
wrong. And let the computer figure out the bugs for me :). It somewhat reminds
me of Prolog.

