Friday, November 9, 2012

Finding problems before and during development

Recently, I've been thinking about specification by example. For the last two days, I've been thinking that with the datapoints I'm seeing at my work, it may be an investment not worth the effort we'd put there.

In the last two days, I've logged plenty of issues on a particular feature area not working as it should. It actually works as specified, or within the limits of how it's been specified, but just doesn't serve its purpose.

I realize I could have - if I even looked at the thing earlier - told about some of the issues we'll be facing later on. Now that I tell of them, they're concrete behaviors (or lack of thereof) in the implemented system.

But what surprised me is that there seems to be very little rework, but more of extra work that just hasn't been done yet. And for now, it seems that the risk of regression isn't that big a deal either - with the type of system, unit tests seem to do a decent job on their own.

I reserve my right to rethink this. But I just find it hard to digest, that using more effort before development than less during development would be the way to go.