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Refactoring Rails Applications or why tests are a good idea

Somewhat of an add-on to the post “Lotus Notes is not agile”. The project I’m working on with the good folks of sourcepole, is a network monitoring tool. We are using Ruby on Rails to build a web frontend to some Ruby Network monitoring-fu. The network topology is stored in a database, and in our first delivery we got the fundamental database design wrong. So I spent half a day thinking about a new database model and spent the remainder of the day to build a quick spike to test if the new database model would be able to sustain the requirements. This remaining day was spent over the weekend with much cursing and muttering, but finally it seemed to work. ...

Jens-Christian Fischer
/ #blog 

Lotus Notes is not agile

Julian Robichaux has a recent article “Agile Development is not for me”. As you can guess from the title, he’s not in the agile camp: What's worse is, the "we'll cross that bridge when we get to it" mentality doesn't take into account that there's a certain kind of butterfly effect with software design. A tiny change in architecture at the beginning can have huge impacts later on (for better or worse). Likewise, having to make a seemingly tiny change to core functionality or design later on down the road can be a major undertaking. I have been doing agile development for the last couple of years with good results and experiences, both for me and my customers. There is one big caveat though: You will need to work with a technology that supports agile processes. ...

Jens-Christian Fischer