[Melbourne-pm] Agile Perl

Stephen Steneker stephen at sydney.pm.org
Fri Jun 15 17:25:51 PDT 2007


> Anyone want to fire back a shot?

Hi Alec,

Posted a short comment on your blog .. I think the "agile" practices
you mention (testing, refactoring, integration) are really just sane
prerequisites for any large (or serious) modern software project.

eg. you can't know something works without testing .. can't
refactor without having test cases .. and really need mock
objects to be able to create some good test cases.

Wouldn't say these are all easy tasks (particularly depending on
the application design), but the challenges are not unique to
perl and there is an evolving set of tools available.

That said, many software projects are not sane .. so it's
encouraging if most folks at the melbourne.pm meeting said
"yes, we do that" rather than "great idea, we'd love to try".

Perl actually lends itself well to agile development in terms
of supporting short iterations with delivery of working software.
Code components can easily be packaged up into modules
for isolated testing and reuse.

There are much more contentious agile practices like pair
programming or the Planning Game which can be difficult
to implement without proper support .. but these are process
issues, not language specific.

In regards to your friend's cheeky comment on monosyllabic
variable names .. cryptic programmers are compatible with
any language ;-).

Cheers,
Stephen



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