Susan is the former Associate Director, Software Development and Project Management at the Center for Teaching and Learning. She remixes solutions and strategies to help imperfect people build more perfect software.
Here at the CTL, we are passionate about delivering high quality code that adheres to community standards. Our quality control arsenal includes unit tests, code reviews, static analyzers, style checkers, and continuous integration. Our recent adoption of webpack for JavaScript interactives required a fresh approach for unit and client-side testing complexities.
At CTL, client-side interactives enrich many of our serial-learning web applications. These discrete JavaScript blocks challenge students with quizzes, animations, case studies, calculators and games. Many of our interactives carry enough context to stand on their own statelessly. We recently explored ways to package these interactives for wider distribution.
I see programmers as inherently helpful people. Given a 57-step flowchart describing the steps some poor soul has to execute manually, most programmers get a little gleam in their eye and set about providing a streamlined solution. Programmers truly love removing those inefficiencies. Meanwhile, the customer stops wrestling with a frustrating system and gets on with his job.
One of the primary tenets of agile development is test first, test often. After working in a small XP shop doing mobile development, I came to believe strongly that quality code hinges on a test-driven approach.
