Software developers have often the habit to write code faster than their software testing capabilities. This creates a backlog of untested code. In this blog post, Dennis Stevens proposes some hints about things that programmers can do instead of writing untested code.
As Dennis Stevens wrote it at the beginning of this post: “The goal is not to write code faster. The goal is to produce valuable, working, testing, remediated code faster.” So he proposes six things that developers can work on:
1. Get ready for upcoming work – In complex products, not being able to make and keep commitments creates delays that are very costly.
2. Help finish work in progress – Developers and testers should work together to achieve the work that the team committed for the sprint.
3. Expand capability and future capacity – Work on spreading scarce skills or knowledge sets to other members of the team.
4. Increase testing capacity – Developers should use their skills to increase software testing capacity, working for test automation and test data management tools
5. Refactor difficult code
6. Improve your practice – Increase the capacity and capability of the team by practicing new programming skills in coding dojos.
The conclusion of Dennis Stevens is “The goal is for the organization to produce valuable, working, tested, remediated product faster. These two items often collide. Make the best economic decisions – and writing code that can’t be tested is typically not the best economic decision.”
Read the complete blog post on http://www.leadingagile.com/2013/09/stop-writing-code-cant-yet-test/