Here is the back-story.

We have a client that needs to add significant graphing capability to their site and we are determining which open source tools to integrate with to meet this requirement. We always strive to have our work be reusable, so I thought what would be the most valuable thing we could do with a graph for each of our clients.

Many of our sites are variations of communities of practice. In a community of practice the users are interested in finding other users like themselves, and seeing where they are different from others. They may also be interested in new users and perhaps who are the old timers.

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I am blogging this because I want to reuse it with nonprofit clients who are just starting to think about how they want to use Web 2.

http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2006/10/12/web_20_ten_ways_nonprofits.htm

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"Here’s a little secret that many “test-infected” developers know: testing makes you a better programmer. It’s not just that your code works. It’s that if you find something is hard to test, that’s a code smell. Maybe your superWunderFunction() which takes 13 arguments isn’t designed terribly well. That’s not saying that all hard-to-test code has a design flaw (GUIs, for example), but as you test more, you start writing code that’s easier to test.

Your functions will take fewer arguments. Your functions won’t try to do too many things. Your functions are more likely to be loosely coupled. You’ll have less reliance on global variables. The list goes on and on.

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