Everybody who gets excited about requirements management and documentation – raise your hand. Okay. Thank you. You’re free to go. For those left – you can mate automated tests with a bit of convention and scripting magic to simplify your requirements management life. Here’s how.

Two weeks ago, I upgraded a project from rails 2.0.2 to 2.2.2. I had done some polymorphic associations, and I needed more powerful eager loading to prevent N+1 queries. The latest version of rails happens to meet my needs perfectly.

I told the customer that this work needed to be done and that it might take a few days to do it right, as it's a large project and depends on a large number of gems and plugins. The customer was very reasonable and said if it had to be done, then we'd take the time to do it right. So I did the upgrade.

Shortly after completing a small project using Ensemble 2007 we received a developer version of Ensemble 2008. Preliminary to upgrading Ensemble, we imported the project and ran our automated test suites to catch any issues that might arise.