Journey to TDD - Error Feeling

If you found this article and want to start at the beginning, this series starts here.

When the application you need to test is command line based, use aruba. It’s one of the best ways to get a full testing suite around command line applications without ripping everything up (which you will do eventually.)

I talked about using Selenium and Aruba to test legacy applications, which is any application that has not tests.

In my case, I was just starting to figure out everything at once: testing, testing frameworks, selenium, the whole testing first paradigm, and everything associated with that world.

After shooting myself in the foot with a legacy web application and not testing, I vowed to myself:

I never ever want that feeling of dread for programming again.

When I was programming in a research lab, such bugs happened - I was so isolated from the bottom line of the business that it did not matter. What’s the cost of unexpected program behavior for the company? Absolutely negligible.

When it came to my friends - the bug I caused was missing a percent of all transactions, in this case the tax rate. On absolute terms, the error is small with my friend’s project.

If I made the same error at my first job - missing a percent of all transactions, well - let’s say I, my children, their children x 50, would have a hard time paying that error off.

Let that feeling sink in.

The worst part is that seemingly simple can lead to immense dread