Alan checked in and gave me a progress report. He is working on lots of error handling and unit tests (unit testing). We talked about how to use testing going forward. One thing that Alan likes about the tests is, as he goes forward, if he changes something, being able to go back and make sure that all of the prior tests still work (making sure that you are breaking things by changing or adding new code).

We talked a little bit about test driven design and test driven development. The more complicated the code, the more the testing is really needed to make sure that we didn't forget anything. Along those same lines, even if something is not super complicated, the sheer number of tests add up over time (testing for small things, not just the super complex). It gives the developer a level of confidence that things are still in order. We also talked about commenting code and prepping things for others.

I asked Alan about the learning curve for implementing the testing and unit testing stuff. He is getting better and better at it and would be willing to help teach others. So far, just Wayne and Alan have been doing the primary unit testing. All of the other developers test as they go and test up until code sign-off. When learning to do proper unit test, you have to learn about mocking things up, expecting certain results, and checking dependencies.

Other topics of our review were: DAO's (database access objects), services, and using script vs tags inside of ColdFusion. Alan likes script for logic and tags for output and mixed HTML and ColdFusion output. Lots of talk about re-usability of the code and being able to transfer and make things more modular and independent. Good update.