The blog post has "Nobody thought about automating that process. Until
Kent Beck did." That is not accurate, AFAIK. I believe it was in Kent
Beck's original EXtreme Programming book where he says the practices
were gathered from various Smalltalk shops he consulted at during the
Smalltalk heyday in the early 90's.
For what it's worth, here's the history I know. Around 1993, in
Toronto, I was working at Footprint Software on VisualBanker (a suite
of code to support banking that 4 of the 5 major Canadian banks
bought). With my programming buddy (no "pair programming" at the time)
our task was to build a persistence framework (supporting Relational,
ObjectFiler, and in-memory).
My task in a previous job was to convert (the AT&T Unix) C compiler to
support the "new" ANSI C standard. Thankfully, I was provided with a
test suite of C code, so that if it compiled without errors, then the
compiler was standard compliant. So, looking for something similar to
the ANSI C test suite I'd encountered, I set up test cases where all
methods starting with "test" would be run, and ran the tests against
all the backend data stores. The next day, my programming buddy
(George), who started at 6am (to have a faster commute) tells me this
test thing is great, and shows me the UI he built so we could just
push a button. We can check the same behaviour for all backends, and
we can coordinate our code changes through the tests (to mitigate our
different schedule).
A year later, the company's product was deemed slow, so they
contracted Kent Beck to review our code base. He eventually comes
around to us. We showed him what we did with tests, and then he just
paused for about a minute staring out the window. We thought we were
doing something really bad. A few months later, George said to me "did
you see the SUnit thing posted on comp.lang.smalltalk". The basic
"test"-prefixed test cases were there, but with the addition of the
setUp and tearDown concept.
Every once in a while I think to write this up. The "Nobody thought
about automating..." words pushed me over this time. Maybe 15 years
ago, I was able to find the original comp.lang.smalltalk SUnit
posting, but could not locate it this time when I wanted to verify the
dates.
Yanni Chiu,
Smalltalk oldtimer, Toronto
On Fri, Nov 22, 2024 at 8:58 AM Koen De Hondt
koen@all-objects-all-the-time.st wrote:
