This morning, I described my recent work-related activities to Tracy as "Whack-a-Mole". For those of you who aren't familiar with the Hasbro Whac-a-Mole game, it's a fun game for four year olds where you, err, hit moles on the head with a hammer as they pop up out of the game. The goal is to get as many moles as you can - but of course there's an endless supply. You might note that it's less fun when you're older than four, and the "moles" you are whacking are problems that you need to deal with in the course of your daily job.

So anyway, I've been trying to stay on top of too many projects, and I've noticed that whenever I really focus on one of the projects (say, the testing books) the other projects all pop up a bunch of issues with "urgent!" notices on them. No sooner do I whack one of them than do another two or three pop up.

But it gets worse. I have a few projects that in themselves are whack-a-mole projects. One of them is Cartwheel, my moderately popular but slowly obsolescing bioinformatics framework. This sucker has been a problem all along, and it's why I got interested in testing: it's the project that motivated twill. It's big enough that keeping track of all the software dependencies, remote interfaces, and epistatic interactions between the modules requires a certain amount of brainpower. I do not have a big enough brain to devote a corner of it to this project indefinitely, so it's turned into a whack-a-mole project: one day, a problem will pop up in module A; another day, module B; and another day, module C. It doesn't matter how many problems I whack, up pops another!

Now, fortunately for me (and unfortunately for the moles' heads), I've discovered automated testing. Everytime I find a new probem, I outline it with automated tests. Then I fix the problem, and write some more tests. This means that not only am I whacking the mole's head, but I'm covering the mole hole with something -- concrete or canvas, depending on the day and the nature of the hole. Whatever the covering, that module is going to have fewer mole heads popping up in the future, and pursued to its logical end, the application's problem areas will eventually be covered with tests. No more uncovered mole holes!

(Cue amusing image of a bunch of frustrated moles banging their heads against soft but unyielding mole hole covers. Hmm, that seems like a good testing book cover... ;)

Just another bonus of automated testing: less and less whack-a-mole! (Try selling that to your corporate bosses...)

All right, back to writing tests. (Oh, look, another mole head! thud Poor moles...)

--titus