When I’m programming, I sometimes need to use a problem solving pattern, that Kent Beck called Parallel. The pattern tells us that when your making a change you should also leave the old way of doing things in the program, so you can gradually move to the new solution. This helps in situations, where you can’t just flip a switch to migrate.
The problem with this however is, that you do have to migrate all the way to the new solution, because otherwise you will have twice the code and data in various states.
When I’m using Parallel, I like to keep an eye on the progress and I don’t like to go back to the old way. To help me with this I created a unit test that monitors the progress that I make, while changing the program and the data.
It would be nice to have a test module that keeps track of this, but at the moment I only have a small test program. It does three things:
- Read the previous count (of old way occurences)
- Check if the current count is smaller or equal to the previous count.
- If true, the test succeeds and then writes the count to a file. If false, the test will fail.
This way the tests will only succceed if I make improvements or if the code stays the same. This way it can only improve the code.