Chapter 20: Finishing the ShiftEnter Story

The Programmer Unit Tests for the Shift+Enter are working. Chet and I implement the Customer Acceptance Test and install the hooks in the GUI ” and in our testing framework ”to make it work.

Wrapping Up the Job

We told the customers ( ourselves ) about our fears with the Shift+Enter: that it will make the neat auto-insertion of paragraph tags insert them in strange places. The customers weren t as concerned as the programmers. They said, Let us try it. If we don t like it, we ll think of something, or you will. Somewhat relieved, we decided to go ahead and finish the feature so that it could be tried out.

Two things were left to be done. We had to hook up the XMLNotepad Form to process the Shift+Enter properly (calling InsertReturn), and we had to give the customer an acceptance test. We decided that the customer test was a bit time-consuming and that doing it would teach us little, and we felt that putting the feature into the Form might be a bit difficult. We decided to do the implementation first.

Isn t This Against the Rules?

Extreme Programmers all over the world are clamoring now, telling us that this is against the rules: you re supposed to write the test first. Well, that s what the rules say. The rules also say, They re Only Rules. We re here to report what we did and how it turned out. This is not a highly polished book about a made- up project. This is real people, doing real programming, making real decisions, some good, some bad, learning as we go. Last Tuesday, sitting in the Borders Cafe, that s what we decided to do. Read on, and find out how it turned out.