Coding and Testing

Code is not ready for release until unit test cases are run and verified. It is always recommended that this rule is religiously followed no matter how little changes that the programmer might have done. Recently I had to relearn this rule the hard way. Confident that nothing would have got broken with the kind of changes that I did, I merged the changes to mainline with out complete testing. The code was released to the test team. And when I attend the office the next day and check my mail, there is a high severity bug reported. A bug so severe it had blocked a huge chunk of test cases of the test team. I had to resubmit the code with the fix sooner. The fix was trivial, thanks to Rational clearcase, I could diff the versions of code and find the cause for the issue. The lessons learnt are, always do complete analysis of the difference b/w the mainline code which has been thoroughly tested and the changed version before merging the codes. And do exhaustive testing before release of the code to avoid the test team report embarrassing issues. The time for testing might be greater than the time invested for writing code but still DO the testing. Lastly I would say that I have fallen in love with the Rational clearcase. I haven’t had experience on any other but I say any amount that might be quoted for the license of the tool is highly justifiable!