[Lazarus] I desperately need some ideas of reducing edit, compile, debug cycle

Graeme Geldenhuys graemeg.lists at gmail.com
Mon Nov 29 08:26:51 CET 2010


Op 2010-11-26 21:56, Frank Church het geskryf:
> One thing that has always gottem to me when using Delphi and now Lazarus is
> the tedious edit, compile, debug cycle. It has been growing worse of late
> that now I am beginning to dread the whole process any time I have to make
> some changes, especially when they are just minor GUI changes.


You are describing the classic case where I would recommend TDD (Test
Driven Development). It completely removes the "guessing game" from
programming. By that I mean, you don't have to guess what the new change
will affect or break. Simply make the change, compile the test suite and
run it. If you get a red bar, you know what it affected and broke. And
because you just made that code change, you know exactly what code you need
to work with to fix the issue.

I highly recommend you read the book "Test Driven Development by Example -
by Kent Beck". It's a thin book, so quick to read, but full of very useful
information on how to get started with TDD and how the development cycle works.

TDD is a shift in thinking about how to write a program, but once you have
experienced how great it is, you will not consider writing any program
without writing unit tests first.


Regards,
  - Graeme -

-- 
fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal
http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/





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