The Craft of Developing Ruby Applications

Random Ideas

• Behavior/Test Driven Development (B/TDD)

  • Test::Unit introduction to show how it is not easy to write/organize tests
  • RSpec is great for writing unit tests
  • Define unit tests( RSpec ) vs functional/Integation tests ( Cucumber )
  • Write tests first or at least as you write the code

• Continuous Integration

  • Benefits
  • HowTo

• User Stories

  • user stores and their benefit to the development process
  • User Stories and writing cucumber tests
  • Using Pivotal Tracker
  • Product Backlog Management

• Social Coding

  • Benefits
  • Using git and github
  • Introduce social coding and its benefits as part of the craft of developing ruby applications

• Team Dynamics

  • Single Developer
  • Pair Programming
  • Large Team Decomposition

• Refactoring

  • avoid writing another language in ruby
  • Improving code you just wrote
  • turning good code into extensible code
  • Input validation
  • Custom Exceptions

• Meta-Programming

  • Go over the example of adding ActiveRecord like sugar to the data table syntax
  • method missing
  • class methods (define_exception)

• Profiling

  • introduce benchmark
  • cover the simple example of converting 2 arrays into a hash

• Static Code Analysis

  • using reek to uncover code smells
  • flay
  • flog
  • heckle

• Example Applications

  • Report Framework
  • DataTable
  • DefineException
  • VR::Script written more generically