Working in a Team

Working effectively as a team relies on good communication and good organisation. There is no one-size fits all that will work perfectly for every team. Every individual will have preferences and expectations based on their previous experience. Attempts to improve team processes may backfire, but it is important to at least attempt to find compromise positions that will help everyone work together effectively.

For the sake of argument let’s separate the different technical decisions from the process of collaboration and teamwork. …

Okay, so I have the multiple repository functionality basically working, but it’s time to clear up and make things right … here’s my checklist from yesterday:

• the acceptance test does not check that the second repo has been stored
• the acceptance test is not very readable
• currently the project page does not display all the repos
• the project has various unit tests based on being able to set the github_url
• the project model validates the URL
• the process for safely migrating the existing data on production
• the old hand rolled js from my initial attempt is hanging around

So attacking…

So the answer to my question of yesterday, “Why is Acceptance Testing so hard?” is that any coding is hard when you can’t get error messages. The remote debug inspector I set up yesterday allowed me to see that our Capybara/Poltergeist/PhantomJS setup could not handle ES6 string interpolations. It raises the question about why not, but I want to push on with this feature.

The test is now failing on this error:

And I should see a link to "multiple repo project" on github            # features/step_definitions/projects_steps.rb:84…

I think I’m almost there with acceptance testing this multiple repo feature, but it makes me wonder why acceptance testing always seems to be so time consuming. I’m just wrapping up a private project where acceptance testing of electron apps was a real pain, and I really question if it was time well spent since the resulting acceptance tests are slow and unreliable. Perhaps all that time would have been better spent on unit tests and getting a really coherent domain model sorted out. The acceptance testing framework I’m using for Rails is a bit more stable, although it’s all…

So I’m on the train into london for a meeting with the NHS, but unlike in my last year of blogging it’s not time to agonize about how everything’s going, but time to focus on finishing up this feature for multiple project repositories. Yesterday I checked that I could get the basic functionality that we need using the Cocoon gem.

Now I need to hook it up to the acceptance tests, consider whether we need unit tests, and work on the styling of the form. A bit of kicking around with CSS and I got it to look like this:

So my AV ecosystem reviews are getting further afield. Here I am inspecting different gems for the purpose of completing a feature to support multiple project repositories. What are the goals of this ongoing review? It’s to focus my blogging power onto making the AV ecosystem as welcoming and easy to use as possible. That’s the flow of people from external sources to our website, to our Slack instance and to contributing to the projects we have hosted on GitHub. …

So, struggling through tears for my father (just listened to a >Code episode on mental health) I’m bringing myself to focus on continuing this user rerequest feature about multiple repos for AV projects. Let’s warm up by making sure all our local code is up to date:

[tansaku@Samuels-MBP:~/Documents/Github/AgileVentures/WebsiteOne (master)]$ 
→ git checkout develop
Switched to branch 'develop'
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/develop'.
[tansaku@Samuels-MBP:~/Documents/Github/AgileVentures/WebsiteOne (develop)]$ 
→ git pull origin develop
From http://github.com/AgileVentures/WebsiteOne
 * branch              develop    -> FETCH_HEAD
Already up-to-date.
[tansaku@Samuels-MBP:~/Documents/Github/AgileVentures/WebsiteOne (develop)]$ 
→ git checkout 761_multiple_source_repository 
Switched to branch '761_multiple_source_repository'
[tansaku@Samuels-MBP:~/Documents/Github/AgileVentures/WebsiteOne (761_multiple_source_repository)]$…

So I woke at 4am this morning and couldn’t go back to sleep. I lay with my thoughts for 90 minutes before I couldn’t bear it any longer and put on audio comedy from Christopher Titus. Painful thoughts about kids football and tangled electron apps. Now I’m having trouble focusing on the keyboard, but want to enjoy having cleared the “Please Check” column of the WebSiteOne waffle board yesterday: