At Compassites we have project developments on Ruby on Rails and J2EE. Now that we have realized the power of rails and its power to create rapid application development we are using it to boost our development productivity on the J2EE applications as well. As we are executing our projects using eXtreme programming techniques, development happens as and when requirements are clear. But this also means that we assume certain dependencies of incomplete requirements. There might be a data dependency from a requirement that is not complete. In such situations with the available information we create temporary table structures. When the business analysts and the testers test the application at the end of an iteration they need to have some valid content in these temporary tables.

We create the CRUD (create, read, update, delete) screens rapidly using ruby on rails that connects to the same database as the application does. Then the BA’s and testers use the rails application to add the data they want through these CRUD screens . Even in the development environment it saves a lot of time to manipulate these temporary tables and none of us have to run SQL against the database or need to understand to use a database tool. Since the rails application is throw away, we don’t need to add any validations, error or exception handling checks. So within minutes the CRUD screens are ready for use. This is like data mocking equivalent to the object mocking.