Synopsis: Magic Beans

Let’s imagine another scenario. “Why is it taking so long to add one little feature?” asks your manager one day. Your manager had assigned your team to enhance the bug-tracking application to show a count of how many comments a bug had received. You’ve been working on this task for four weeks.

Your group of software developers in the meeting room look reluctant to answer the question. As project lead, you answer, “We’ve had a couple of false starts,” you explain. “It seemed simple at first until we realized there were some other screens in the application where we needed to show the comment count.”

“And designing the screens took four weeks?” your manager asks.

“Well, no, that’s just a little bit of HTML, and that’s pretty easy since we use the framework that separates code from presentation,” you go on. “But each time we added this element to a screen, we had to duplicate code to fetch data in the screen’s back-end code. And that meant each back-end class needed a new suite of tests.”

“Don’t we ...