At the 2008 PDC, I finally was able to meet the people behind one of my favorite products, NCover. As I’m passionate, (some would say a zealot!) about code coverage, having a great tool like NCover in the market is wonderful. While there are all sorts of development methodologies you can follow, there’s only one way to know if developers are actually doing their job: code coverage!
While you can scrum and agile your team all you want, you need a measurable metric to prove developers are achieving the goals you set for them. That’s exactly what code coverage tells you. By enforcing a high level of code coverage before checking in the code to the master sources, your developers are proving to the rest of the team that their code is ready to test and integrate with the rest of the team. Like anything else in software, without a measurement, you’re not developing software you’re “guessing” software.
Hanging out and talking with the NCover team, who are obviously as passionate about code coverage as I am, was a blast. We thought it would be a blast to continue the conversation in a form where we could bring in questions and comments from others. On Wednesday, March 18, 2009 from 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM EDT, we’ll be hosting the discussion and you can register at this link.
On the call with me will be Peter Waldschmidt, the product visionary behind NCover. He’s a very successful development manager who’s grown companies and managed large teams so knows a thing or two about quality. If we have the time, I will have to ask Peter more about his Ariel Atom.