diary at Telent Netowrks

Testing a monolithic app - how not to#

Wed, 11 May 2011 16:56:25 +0000

In the process of redesiging the interfaces to thin-prefork I thought that if it's going to be a design not a doodle I'd try to do it the TDD way and add some of that rspec goodness.

I'm not so proud of what I ended up with

There are a number of issues with this code that are all kind of overlapped and linked with each other, and this post is, unless it sits as a draft for considerably longer than I intended to spend on it, going to be kind of inchoate because all I really plan to do is list them in the order they occur to me.

Overall I think the process has been useful, but the end result feels brittle, it's taken nearly as long as the code did to write, and it's still not giving me the confidence to refactor (or indeed to rewrite) blindly that all the TDD/BDD advocates promote as the raison d'embĂȘter

The brighter news is, perhaps, that I'm a lot more comfortable about the hook/event protocol this time round. There are still bits that need filling in, but have a look at Thin::Prefork::Worker::Lifecycle and module TestKidHooks for the worker lifecycle hooks, and then at the modules with names starting @Test...@ for the nucleus of how to add a custom command.