Swimfish is a fantastic company and it is a truly exciting time to be here. We are developing fantastic products and working closely with some very interesting companies.
Here are the rules that I insist our developers live by, as the Swimfish engineering team. I think these are critical for most teams and wanted to share them:
- ALWAYS complete QA regression testing prior to sending any build to a customer.
- ALWAYS perform complete developer unit testing prior to posting a build to a customer facing server as well as for QA testing.
- Never, EVER, check in broken code. We have all made this mistake, I am sure. If you’re checking in code so that you have a placeholder, make sure that the incomplete code cannot be reached (comment it out, put a return before it, be creative). Make sure there are clear comments in the code so that the next person that looks at it knows what they are looking at.
- ALWAYS perform thorough testing prior to resolving any bugs.
- Never, EVER, mark a bug as deferred or invalid without reviewing with your management team.
If anyone does read this post, let me know what you think.
-John
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March 27, 2009 at 1:53 pm
As a developer who has recently transitioned to the QA Testing role I have to tell you that list of rules is common sense. However, and I have seen this over and over, not everyone is capable of, or cares to, grasp these simple rules.
In fact I am going to say that what you have defined here is a way to distinguish between a developer, no matter how intelligent or how much experience they may have, and a senior developer.
Just my thoughts.
Cheers
February 24, 2009 at 10:21 pm
[...] are investing a proper amount of time on their unit testing. We are also striving to live by my Engineering Tenants which keeps us focused on doing the right things. Let me know what you think. Have you ever worked [...]
February 4, 2009 at 12:51 am
Great feedback Joe. I’m going to tweak the tenents.
February 3, 2009 at 3:34 pm
Hi John – Saw the blog … nicely done. One comment, how about some rules that start with “Always” rather than “Never, EVER” … just a thought.