I have never enjoyed the theory behind software engineering. It seems particularly depressing as it can be summarized as: “What can we learn from past software development experience in order to not repeat old mistakes such that we can come up with newer and shinier mistakes?”.
For that reason I haven’t been able to stick to any particular software development doctrine (paired, test-driven, OO, SOA, etc) and instead taken shortcuts to whatever is practical at the time.
One unfortunate result of such neglect is that the oink test suite ended up not being utilized. I tried it a couple of times while starting out with oink and it failed in many cumbersome ways. However, as pork evolved out of oink, I learned more about the “architecture” behind it, I fixed a couple of the issues that were causing funny make errors.
However one giant bug remained. Turned out other people were able to run the original oink testsuite, but not the equivalent one in pork. Fearing that I somehow screwed up Elsa, I spent way too long investigating the failure only to learn it wasn’t my fault. Pork users: rejoice, the testsuite should run as expected now.
PS. I may not be a SENG believer, but I do think that open source + good version control + testsuites result in better software.