TeamCity & “Works on My Machine”

I love TeamCity as a build/ci tool. I really do. However, I have noticed from time to time when I go searching their bug-tracking system that I’m in the midst of reporting a bug they had previously fixed. I’ve seen this more than once so this led me to wonder aloud on twitter if the TeamCity developers practiced TDD.

I followed the link to their blog post. In their discussion of how they do Continuous Delivery within their organization I would draw your attention to step 2:

While the build is running, two developers from the team (Duty Devs) review all commits made by the team during the day and if they both agree commits won’t break critical parts of the application, such as areas responsible for running and scheduling builds and build agent auto-upgrade, they put a special tag on the build marking it as “safe for deployment”.

emphasis added

Now let me draw your attention to Jeff Atwood’s wonderfully snarky blog post, Works on My Machine. Step 3:

Cause one code path in the code you’re checking in to be executed. The preferred way to do this is with ad-hoc manual testing of the simplest possible case for the feature in question. Omit this step if the code change was less than five lines, or if, in the developer’s professional opinion, the code change could not possibly result in an error.

emphasis added

Again, I love TeamCity. I think it’s a great product. I think it’s build-chains feature makes it far and away a better CI tool than any of the alternatives–especially in an enterprise-y SOA context. It is not my intention to shame them. Still, the producers of a tool widely used to perform the Continuous Integration side of TDD does not itself practice TDD.

Wow.

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