The other night I was driving home quite late from the airport.  For that hour, the roads are quiet and it’s a relaxing drive home that gives me a chance to think back on the the day’s events.  At a red traffic light, I stopped, but some idiot in the lane next to me rushed straight through.  You know what happened in the next 5 minutes.  Lots of honking, screeching tires and near crashes.  Fortunately, there were not accidents and nobody got hurt.
Really?

No!  Even though there wasn’t this big crash, someone did get a fright of their life, even I as an observer got a fright. And someone else did continue their journey quite shaken and certainly not in their same frame of mind.  The only person that seemed to be least affected was the person who jumped the red light.  But I am speculating, maybe he was under pressure and really needed to get to the end on time, and so he rushed ahead and saw in his rear view the potential destruction he left behind.  And maybe he regrets his decision.  But he certainly did not see how his actions affected the other people that were close by, myself included.

Driving through a red light can kill you and you can kill other people too.  The same thing happens when ignore the red light from your tests.  You can hurt yourself and you can hurt other people too.

Just think about that red light at the traffic light and in your code.  It’s telling you so much.

• It’s telling you to slow down a bit.
• To look around.
• To think about the moment.
• Don’t focus on the end, you will get there in good time.
• If you ignore the red light, other things will break and other people will get hurt.
• Maybe you don’t know why you must stop, but you need to stop first, before you can find out why.
• It’s telling you to do the right thing, not the rushed thing.

Driving through a red light is another suicide pattern that I will add to my growing list.

And TDD is also part of ubuntu coding.  I am not telling you anything new.  I’m just telling you the same thing from another perspective.