I didn’t say I never tested, but after six weeks of work I had only a few minor bugs that took me less than an hour to track down and fix. Pieces I didn’t even remember writing worked perfectly. I did this at Intel in 1995 and they were so impressed they excused me from most meetings, which at Intel is like being crowned Pope. And the 350-pound Intel people who scheduled three-day meetings were furious.
You may never have known Flow if you started in the industry within the last fifteen years or so; you have no idea what people can do when allowed to concentrate. Please read my article, follow the links.
I’ve had methodology fanatics tell me that people who want to focus are mentally ill. Fine, then I’m mentally ill. But I’ve seen the confidence in managers’ eyes when I say “I am on it” and I love that feeling.
meant that you did not do testing until the end. I must have misunderstood what you wrote.
I’m glad your approach works for you. However, I personally not found writing tests to be disruptive to my ability to concentrate or Flow. On the contrary, creating a handful of small, quick tests helps me more quickly outline my work flow, highlight potential fault paths, and make better code that other developers can maintain and extend.
My approach generates confidence in my manager’s eyes, so perhaps there are multiple correct ways to generate good code. I’m glad your Flow methodology works for you, though I can definitely see integration and communication difficulties in a moderate sized team if every developer was using your Flow methodology.
It sounds like you are not well suited for modern software development practices. Although, if your reaction to meetings is so intense that having a scheduled meeting every few weeks would hospitalize you, then you probably aren’t well suited to any corporate job.
Working as part of a development team isn’t right for everyone, and that’s fine.
It’s not the fact of a meeting. I think one per week is enough, with one-offs for subsets of the team.
But “let’s spend three hours discussing what we just learned about teamwork” would make me vomit. I don’t want to put my feet on the team table with everyone else and I don’t want alcohol-fueled team morale sessions.
If you can’t see the foundational flaws in for example TDD then then chasm is unbridgeable and scragile is a total waste of time.
Then I did about 45 minutes of manual testing, found a few minor bugs and fixed them, and asked the manager for a real test case. I gave them the right answers.
They were impressed enough, knowing what they were seeing, to excuse me from almost all meetings so I could work. Being excused from a meeting at Intel is like being crowned Pope. They had THREE DAY meetings so they could scarf down donuts. Losing control over my time made them furious.
I worked at Microsoft for exactly half of 1989-2009 on six different gigs. I saw their last year of greatness. In 1989 I loved working there. I shipped two entire products singlehandedly, one of which was the very first version of what is now the SQL Server Management Console. We didn’t call it that.
Most of you have never worked under conditions where you could concentrate so you have no idea what you can achieve that way, so I must sound superhuman. I’m not. I’ve worked with people a lot smarter than I am and solved problems they couldn’t. Yeah I’m smart but I am no Isaac Newton.
Because I can concentrate. You might try it sometime but you would have to learn to do it, and growing up with channel surfing and games may have disabled it. Software companies used to work hard to create conditions where we could focus; now you guys regard people who want to concentrate as mentally ill.
When you can’t concentrate you write lousy code. So instead of re-enabling focus you come up with this methodology and unit-testing horseshit, which just makes it worse. I can work alone and get more done alone than six modern methodology lunatics.
Just because others have different software practices than you does not make them inferior to you. Please do not insult others because you believe yourself to be superior to them. That’s not what we are here for on freeCodeCamp.
I made a reference in passing to another linguistic corruption and ended up in an argument I am very tired of. Live and learn; had I omitted that reference the thread wouldn’t have gone there. I apologize for that sloppiness in my own writing but I take nothing back.