|
Programming by Coincidence
http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/ppbook/extracts/coincidence.html
The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master is a must read for anyone who
thinks seriously about software engineering.
This free sample chapter is one of the 46 in the book that identify
a bad hacking habit, explain its pitfalls, and then describe its remedies.
If you want to become a better programmer, then you should read this book
to get you thinking about how you can improve your programming habits.
This chapter discusses programming deliberately,
which is the idea that we should not stop testing code when it seems to work,
but rather we can stop testing code when we have proved to ourself that it works.
Similarly, when you try to write a test suite for BasicList that
exposes its bugs, make sure that your test is detailed enough that it
unambiguously identifies the bug. That is, prove to yourself that
there is a bug in BasicList rather than being wishy-washy about
it and guessing what the bug is from a small sample set of behavior that
you have observed.
|