

Results of our Ruby development survey - wastedbrains
http://devver.net/blog/2008/06/the-results-of-our-ruby-development-survey/

======
wastedbrains
Are there any questions we didn't ask or other stats Ruby hackers would find
interesting?

Perhaps most common used gems or plugins?

~~~
KevinMS
The test/notest divide is very roughly 50/50, I'd like to know what percentage
of testers found tests to actually help catch bugs, and what percentage of
notesters wished they had tests because they are confident tests would have
caught eventually discovered bugs sooner.

I ask this because the (rails) testing koolaid still tastes funny to me. I
wonder if any practice that focuses the attention on code quality, whether
TDD, BDD, unit testing, pair programming, cleanroom, etc, would catch the same
bugs.

~~~
jm4
I'd venture to guess nearly all developers using unit tests would say they are
helpful, otherwise they wouldn't be using them. This isn't meant to be snide.
I'm just saying that if you already suspect koolaid then any feedback is
basically worthless because the only people responding are the ones who have
seen measurable results and idiots who drink koolaid, and there's no way to
tell the difference. The feedback from non-testers might be a little more
useful, but it's still a little suspect considering it's from people who are
confident more testing would improve their software yet still don't do it.
Furthermore, unit tests are only as good as the test cases themselves and a
survey can't account for quality of tests. I guess my point is that while
surveys can be interesting, at the end of the day they're just a popularity
contest and not very good for determining what works and what doesn't.

~~~
bhb
Exactly. I'd still love to see real study on whether unit testing is worth it
(which our survey doesn't even begin to address, since it's very hard to
measure). I think some good studies on that would be invaluable, but it's
nearly impossible to control for all the variables, so I'm not holding my
breath.

Failing that, most of the "evidence" one way or the other is based on asking
people who test or don't test - and probably most testers would say that
testing is great while non-testers would say testing wouldn't catch the kinds
of bugs that matter. On the flip side, you have some testers saying it's not
valuable (because their test quality is bad) and some non-testers saying they
are sure tests would help, but only because they imagine tests to be a silver
bullet.

In any case, our survey was just supposed to get a rough feel for how many
people were doing testing (and what tools they used). What surprised me most
was that even small teams (1 and 2 people) often had a test suite. This flew
in the face of the anecdotal evidence we had previously gotten from other
startups (almost none of ones we have talked to use tests).

~~~
KevinMS
On example of the question would be, "Do your tests ever find bugs, or do they
just sit there always working."

No koolaid, how about the post from this moron
[http://kurt.karmalab.org/articles/2008/02/07/rails-app-
witho...](http://kurt.karmalab.org/articles/2008/02/07/rails-app-without-
tests-guaranteed-fail)

If you look at page 470 of the latest Code Complete, it shows that unit tests
have a very low defect detection rate,

Cleanroom software engineering has the best record of quality, but there's no
buzz for that now in the ruby community, maybe because it doesnt sell books
:-P

------
vizard
Does anybody here actually use gedit? And why?

edit : genuinely curious. not trying to put down gedit.

------
railroadmike
I just love my net beans.

I would have thought that this great IDE would have made a stronger showing.

~~~
wastedbrains
Netbeans is nice, but I am actually in the process of leaving it for straight
emacs. Netbeans stalls out, is a memory hog, and crashes nearly daily for me
right now. I also found that I really only use it as a SVN GUI, and file
manager. I the code completion is slow and never useful to me, many of the
auto complete features are just annoying. My Ruby tools like autotest, irb,
debugger, and rake tasks are just more responsive on the command line (some
don't really work at all inside Netbeans).

I really liked it for awhile, but I started realizing that I didn't use or
really like most of the advanced features, and all the work it does trying to
provide those features are makes it slow.

Do anyone else's Netbeans seem to index things for the first hour the program
is opened?

