

Show HN: Codetract, software micro-contracting via unit testing - milohoffman
https://www.codetract.com/

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kwr
I think I like this idea but I'm not sure if I can decompose my applications
into small enough chunks. Maybe you could add mock services to call out to?

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RossM
It's fun, but I appear to have 135 points after completing about 35 points of
contracts :)

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milohoffman
Thanks for pointing this out! There was an issue with point total calculation
that has been fixed, and all users' totals have been updated appropriately.

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tgflynn
It will be a good idea when you can actually get paid for implementing
contracts.

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milohoffman
Thanks! Yes, paid contracts are coming soon :)

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lifeisstillgood
This is a really good idea and _something_ like this will be the 99designs of
the coding world.

I am not entirely sure it will work, (the effort to write the unittests is
high) and there is little understanding of the codebase it will enter and the
code reuse issue is ...

Add to that integration and delivery and this unittest approach is a problem.

But change it to be "here is our code and CI on github", create a pull request
that will change the flow of the credit card processing to use swipe and
paypal as well as our tired old merchant bank.

People could bid for the project, and so forth.

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tgflynn
If it takes as much effort to write the unit tests as it does to implement the
solution then the problem was trivial to begin with, but that's probably true
of 90% of all programming work.

It might be more useful for harder problems but there are already a number of
sites addressing those : TopCoder, kaggle, Innocentive, etc.

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milohoffman
One thing on my "to-do" list is adding a test suite builder, that allows you
to specify inputs and outputs and then generates the test code for you. That
would allow people who can't code or just aren't familiar with the syntax of a
particular language/framework to still post contracts.

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lifeisstillgood
Cucumber and related "natural language tests" were supposed to do this - allow
non-programmers to program tests.

Turns out everyone who writes a cucumber test is a programmer writing their
own unit tests or a whole batch for everyone else.

I _do_ think there is mileage in wufoo / VWO style webstie testing - record a
series of macros and replay them each day against the site - let people know
when something changes / does not work. ie a regular scheduled sign up with
specific credit card then a cancellation - test that the whole sign up / email
thing is still working.

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ericclemmons
I started working on exactly your last suggestion. We have employees that were
doing this, I said it was a waste of time, they said to have some of our devs
in India do it.

Instead, I created "Amir" which is effectively a Selenium/CasperJS runner
performing pre-recorded tasks each day and checking for outliers. Once it
fails, emails go out.

