I’m not sure who first used it, but I’m also fond of the phrase “working by accident” to describe code that happens to work (today) but doesn’t have any tests around it to exercise and verify it.

When considering a block of code, depending on whether or not there was a not of code built on top of it, we’d talk about it in terms of how easy it would be to “slide that block out of the codebase” entirely.

Now, in my case I tend to rely on very strong typing disciplines (a la Haskell) rather than test driven development to ensure correctness, because I find there is a reduced level of ‘scaffold shearing’ when I make an architectural change, but the basic goal is the same.

I never was a fan of poke and hope, but my friend used to use it all the time.

How is your Swahili? Jenga means ‘build’ in the Swahili ( Kiswahili ) language.