Brussel Airlines have announced that they reduce the velocity of his flies to consume less fuel. Stand to their calculus, if they increase a little bit the duration of their flight the expense to gas up the plane will be reduced by 1,1 Million of Euro per year. In addition to the money ease there will be an ecological benefit for the reduced emission of gas.

Last week I went to a customer that is about to release a quite big web application composed by various modules and services. I worked with them to resolve some issues and close the development cycle.

The thing that let me a little bit disappointed is the way they work: they don’t have unit tests (and this sadly, in Italy, is quite normal) so to “test” the application they have to run it and navigate to the interested page.

The problem is that from the moment that I press F5 it takes about 2 minutes to the moment that the Login page is available, to this adds a bunch of seconds to do the login and another bunch to arrive to  the page that I want to test (in total about 3 minutes).

Let’s do some computation:

They are in the final phase of development so they do little modifications to the code and some bug fixing, so the F5 key is pressed a lot of times during the day, let’s say 50-60 times a day. So:

3 minutes * 50 times = 150 minutes = 2,5h

This mean about 2,5 hours a day spent in doing nothing

Without introducing unit tests that in this final stage will be a loss of time, what about a script that speed-up the Build&Run phase? And maybe an “#ifdef debug” then don’t ask me for username and password but go directly to  the home page? And if we take off from the main solution the projects that are not subjected to modification? And if we will do pair programming so I can avoid to press F5 if my pair see that I make a visible mistake?

These are only some of little actions that helps the team to save some seconds at every debug session, that in a day will be hours!