The Honest Womaniser

The Dev Manager has a phrase that he uses from time to time when he wants to take some shaky code, perhaps lashed together for speed or an acute need, or prototyped as a script, or created as a demo, and bring it into the product.

Let's make an honest woman out of that, he'll say. The novelty of the unexpected anthropomorphism with a side of sexism soon wears off, although some of those kinds of projects can feel a lot like organising a wedding - expense, stress, unrealistic expectations, Mothers-in-law. (Go on, tell me you've never had a Ma-in-law on your project.)

What I've taken from it is the idea that I should always consider coding my quick-and-dirty investigative scripts with a view to making them part of a regression suite later. I don't go that way every time. For instance, when I know it's a stricly one-shot deal like processing log files to diagnose an issue, I'll use whatever is fastest. And when I can get what I need inside an existing suite easily I'll probably do that, although sometimes the overheads there are high.

When I've chosen to write outside a suite but I'm thinking of future incorporation I'll try to match up against the suite on the following kinds of things:

the language, framework, libraries
any variable names (where they're equivalent) or other coding conventions
the structure of any data the tests use
the way the tests are invoked

but only to the extent that I think it's worth trading my main mission against later ease of migration. Or to put it another way, I like my dishonest women fast and my honest women cheap.
Image: http://flic.kr/p/6qijcD

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