What are some good approaches for outsourcing Rails work?

Question

Hi all,

It seems that a great way to build an app might be to identify all the horizontal / domain-independent pieces that don't already exist in the form of gems, plugins or engines, and commission an outsourcing firm to build those pieces in complete isolation from the rest of the code base.

So let's assume a plugin is a great way.

What do you think are the best acceptance criteria? Are there automated tools available to review code such as rails lint? rcov for test code coverage (what's reasonable? 90% or 95%?).

thanks for any thoughts!

Answer 1

There are many tools that will give you an idea of the quality of Ruby code. Have a look at these blog entries to give you an idea of tools and thresholds.

http://devver.net/blog/2008/10/ruby-code-quality-tools/ http://blog.martyandrews.net/2009/05/enforcing-ruby-code-quality.html

As for rcov, for externally developed plugins you should probably aim for 100% coverage. Ruby is dynamically typed and the compiler won't check anything for you. You have to rely on test coverage only to make sure that the code is still wired correctly.

Ruby is easy to stub and with some careful though 100% is achievable - we actually do relatively big projects and enforce 100% coverage at all times.