I’ve been involved in a discussion of sorts regarding unit testing. I had considered making it a CocoaDiscussion, then I realized that it wasn’t Cocoa related. Still, it is a discussion closely associated with development of any kind. I’m not one to ask for organization to the nth degree, but this topic certainly deserves a quick straw poll.
So - consider this a free-form poll. What do you think about creating one more ‘Discussions’ type grouping? Possibly Discussions:Development Practices? Other ideas? - TimHart
I vote for keeping one discussions page. After all, this is a Cocoa website and anything not related to Cocoa should not be on this site to begin with. Now the question is: is UnitTesting related enough to Cocoa to be included on this site? I say yes because many Cocoa develpers are doing UnitTesting. We may also have some UnitTestingQuestions that are directly related to Cocoa developement or the Cocoa UnitTesting frameworks. – RyanBates
So what is an acceptable standard for defining ‘directly related’. I’m currently implementing MockObjects in my testing framework. Are they now relevant to Cocoa by virtue of being in my testing tools? How about ContinuousIntegration? I would imagine not many Cocoa developers are currently doing it. Would they? Should they? Given that not many people are doing it, you could argue that it doesn’t belong here. That’s a reasonable, editorial choice. However, if we don’t allow discussions about things that are currently ‘not Cocoa’, we risk not allowing this board ( or this community ) to mature.
My point is I think that as a community we pretty much agree that a post regarding NASCAR doesn’t belong here. On the other hand, development practices, methodologies and styles are quite useful things to discuss, argue, and debate. While we all might not agree unanimously on what is Cocoa related, I vote that lively discussions on any topic is evidence of enough interest in the community that it should remain for a while.
Having said that - I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the UnitTestingQuestions discussion has reached a lively state just yet – TimHart
One can’t make an exact distinction on what topics are related and unrelated to Cocoa; but, if it helps, the way I see it is if you would use that topic when programming in Cocoa then it is related. UnitTesting and ContinuousIntegration are related because one could use them with Cocoa. This would also mean ObjectiveCee, Java, C and the developing tools are also included. However, it’s probably best to keep things Cocoa targeted. In other words, a tutorial on creating a Carbon application in Xcode wouldn’t fit. – RyanBates