python development practices?

[Nicholas FitzRoy-Dale]

On 31 Oct, Anthony Baxter wrote:
> 
>>>> pzw1 at cornell.edu wrote
>> > [unit tests, XP, blah blah blah]
> 
>> hmm.. this seems to be the uniform response to my questions, and it was 
>> what i had surmised before even posting.  is there really no middle 
>> ground?  are there no real development groups using python with high 
>> time-to-market pressures and imperfect process?  i find it hard to 
>> believe that someone or some group hasn't evolved a way of dealing with 
>> this...
> 
> If you play with them for real a bit, you'll find that unit tests actually
> _improve_ your time to market - the time you need to spend writing them and
> keeping them up to date is more than outweighed by the savings in debugging
> and bughunting.

As someone who has worked in an almost exclusively-Python company for
close to a year, I have to agree that unit (and more importantly
functional) tests vastly speed up development, for exactly the reasons
outlined above. Perhaps Python needs them more than many languages
because of its lack of strong types, but I'm so enamoured with them that
I'm going to try to use them with everything I do.

We also use various other Extreme Programming-related things, such as
pair programming and code reviews, but nothing is quite so company-wide
and (to my mind) useful as the test suites.

-- 
- Nicholas FitzRoy-Dale
http://www.lardcave.net

I'm thinking of getting a pet cheese.  I already have the cheese food.
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