The development testing section of the wiki (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accomplishments/GetInvolved/Testing#Development_Testing) advises the reader to delete their accomplishments config settings before testing so as to provide a sterile environment in which to do it. Recreation of these directories would be carried out by the daemon on startup, however if it is already running then the config files will go uncreated and the view will crash on startup. See bug #1031876 for details.
I'm not familiar enough with how the viewer communicates with the daemon to be sure, but I think a suitable solution would be thus:
1) The viewer checks for the existence of the desired files and directories.
2) Upon not finding them it would ask the daemon to create them
3) The viewer would listen out for the daemon to indicate that it's successfully recreated the directories
4) A failure result should be handled gracefully
Well spotted, and thanks for the bug report. I agree that we should always check to see if the config exists and if not just recreate them with default values.