Blood, Sweat, and Tears

Showing a fellow developer how to create JUnit tests for Java code, I came up with a saying. "Refactoring is a whetstone with which you can hone your design skills." Maybe I can come up with another good phrase that includes unit testing.

Being a Codewright is like being a blacksmith. While casting something in iron is relatively straightforward, it also requires much more prior planning. It also assumes that we want to make copies of an existing design. Anything custom means pounding it out by hand the hard way.

With much sweat and toil in the crucible of coding, we put code into the forge of the code review to make it malleable, we use unit tests like an anvil to support our efforts as we bring to bear the hammer of refactoring to shape the code to our will all the while evaluating how much work is needed to achieve the desired design.

So, when you hear your team banging away at the code ask yourself, is the noise they're making that of peices being moved around with fervent hope that "maybe *this* will work!" or are they methodically improving the code through the use of the forge, hammer, and anvil?