Ask HN: How to plan a minimal restructuring to enable TDD
3 by afarrell | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hi folks, I’ve just moved teams to be the only Senior Engineer on a team with two other engineers who are looking to learn better practices, a team lead who wants to improve the automated testing practices, and a PM (with an HR background) who wants features not to have such a high variance of time-of-delivery. The codebase is relatively small. I want to restructure things to enable the team to start working in a red-green-refactor loop. Problems: 1. It will take some time to enable a workflow of regularly running the specs. I think I would need to have help with the planning. 2. I’m worried that if any of the technical leadership outside the team heard about this, they’d be upset that I talked to my PM about planned refactoring. Martin Fowler says that a perfect team should never need to do a planned refactoring. So our culture is to only refactor incrementally as we go along....which makes about as much sense to me as only washing dishes when you are cooking. (Note: My PM is fine with it so long as it is well-communicated) 3. I don’t know how to make the plan. I’m especially nervous because I don’t know how long planning will take.