On API Usability

Steven talks about API
Usability and even asks you to
sign up to go to API usability tests.
He makes a point that I use often… I call it the “design in reverse”
principle. Before you write
any of your framework, write a simple app that uses it… What are the three lines
of code it takes to perform the common task? Then just build the API to make that
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Comments

• Anonymous
  November 20, 2003
  That's one of the nice aspects of test first development; you usually come up with better APIs because you have designed them "in reverse," in the unit tests.Speaking of which, it'd be very interesting if you could explain to which extent your group is unit testing the Framework when designing new APIs.