Sunday, November 20, 2005
Instant Intent
I have put on sourceforge a few small fragments of code that I kept using over and over to state the intent of my code: Instant Intent.
These poor man's "testing" functions allow you to express the intent of a piece of code and later run a reality check against it. However, these days I don't like using the 'test' word, but I prefer to think in terms of intents and reality checking.
Dave Astel calls them behaviours, but I think I will stick to intent for the time being, just to avoid polluting the semantics of the concept I want to explore.
Some things you can do with intents:
expect 5, (3+2)
(3+2).should_be 5
expect_about Pi, 3.14159
expect_exception (StandardError){
These poor man's "testing" functions allow you to express the intent of a piece of code and later run a reality check against it. However, these days I don't like using the 'test' word, but I prefer to think in terms of intents and reality checking.
Dave Astel calls them behaviours, but I think I will stick to intent for the time being, just to avoid polluting the semantics of the concept I want to explore.
Some things you can do with intents:
expect 5, (3+2)
(3+2).should_be 5
expect_about Pi, 3.14159
expect_exception (StandardError){
puts 5/0}
Comments:
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Nice stuff. How do you use it? I have 2 alternatives in mind:
*) just to shape code and then detach
*) keeping it ala regression testing
Cheers!
*) just to shape code and then detach
*) keeping it ala regression testing
Cheers!
#
posted by 
: Thursday, December 29, 2005 9:46:00 AM
: Thursday, December 29, 2005 9:46:00 AM
I use it in both ways. I call the second activity reality-checking. First you define a 'reality' in language, then you keep checking the consistency of your statements about that 'reality'.
Now I am working on defining a step-by-step sequence to move from quick and rough intents and stories to terse and minimal intents. You could call it Intent Refactoring :-)
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Now I am working on defining a step-by-step sequence to move from quick and rough intents and stories to terse and minimal intents. You could call it Intent Refactoring :-)
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