I’ve had a few discussions with people under various circumstances regarding Test First or Test Driven Development (TDD). Some people swear by TDD, while other don’t see how it could possibly work because “I don’t know how my code works until I write it.” My answer to this is “That’s why you need to write the test first.”

My initial exposure to Test Driven Development was while working for a client at SolutionStream. The client insisted that all development be done Test First. At first, it was a painful process. The tests took a while to write, and I really just wanted to get into solving the problem. As time went on, however, I found that writing the tests first, did a few things that made coding much more pleasant.
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BDD, debugging, Developers, development, TDD, Test First, testers, testing, tests

Setting up a Debug Log

Have you ever been debugging your Rails application and watching the development log fly by wishing that you could put output just the information you need to its own log? There’s actually a quick and easy way to do it.

First, you create your logger.

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@debug_log = Logger.new(File.open(File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/../../log/debug.log", "w"))

Then you log data to it.

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@debug_log.debug @object

It’s simple and it makes the data extremely easy to find. Just take the statements out when you’re done debugging.

debugging, development, logger, ruby errors, Ruby on Rails