Test Dammit!

Lauren wanted to visit her Mum on the farm for a few days before Christmas. The world is well into its pre-Christmas slowdown and I’m coding away on Zeppelin these days, which doesn’t require much Net access, so I said OK. So I’m sitting in front of NetBeans except when I’m out pushing the kid’s sled down the hill or visiting with the cows. Zeppelin, like most software, has lots of layers, and I haven’t fiddled with the bottom-layer APIs for a while. Except for I did, added this trivial little method that Couldn’t Possibly Go Wrong, but (arrrrgh) no JUnit test to be sure. Which cost me the best part of a day of debugging a completely incomprehensible application full stop because down at the bottom level there was an args[0] instead of args[1]. To all those who sat in rooms at one point or another this last couple of years and listened to me drone on in a superior tone of voice about the extreme importance and Karmic excellence of unit testing, you are now entitled to one large snicker in my general direction.