Testing is the key

In one of my projects, we are having a tough time ramping up the team for Drupal. Drupal is mainly about :

• modules
• hooks
• themes
• templates
• overriding over overwriting

We have had the team undergo:
A week long in person training on Drupal. This comprised from basic Drupal architecture, evaluation of modules, themes  to advanced topics like crerating modules, customizing modules, templates and overriding functionality.

The team is still not confident about facing a problem or feature and building a solution. Tthe management now needs to think about how to tackle the situation and bring the team upto speed and ensure that a quality solution is delivered now and everytime.

As a technical analyst and a Drupal developer, I am trying to understand, why is the team taking so long and while the team is still learning to come up to a benchmark, how do we ensure the quality of what the team is working on.

A few options that crossed my mind :
Have a senior developer on the team work closely with the team (unfortunately no budget)
Have a mixed team of 1 senior developer and 1 junior developer (unfortunately no such developer is available)
Have a dedicated person to test the changes thoroughly (since this is a support project and with no detailed functional / requirement documents, the testing team is not ready to own it)


I understand that this is more of a people issue and no one is ready to own the project and ensure quality deliverable. I now think that had the project had tons of unit tests, developers, testers and customers would have been at peace right now.

Unit tests are a key to a project with not many documents, worked upon by new developers.  Drupal does not have many unit tests with the modules and TDD with Drupal is not so straight forward.

I will post my experience with unit tests or automation tests and Drupal more in the coming weeks.