TDD As If You Meant It

Unit testing is becoming a common practice for developers. More and more developers are practising Test Driven Development (TDD). But are you really doing it? Are you really taking the tiny steps of write a single test - make it fail - make it pass - refactor? Are you really letting the tests drive your implementation? Are you still able to make smaller steps when you find yourself in trouble by seeing a failure, not knowing where it comes from? Or do you fall back to the old habit of firing up the debugger? We often see developers take larger and larger steps as they gain more courage. This is also what we did after we learnt TDD. Eventually this results in crappy code. While TDD, as Kent Beck writes in "Test Driven Development by example", is actually the art of making really small steps, so that you can stay productive all the time.

So let's practice what we preach, and take test driven development to the extreme. Let's do tdd as if we really meant it.

In this session we do extreme tdd - oh and yes: it's even more 'bureaucratic' than the 3 or 4 steps that you already know. We follow a very strict micro process where we work in tiny steps, creating all production code initially in the test itself and creating implementation methods and classes only as a result of extract and move method refactorings. We do this as an exercise to find out what the effects are on our design, quality of our code and TDD skills.

This session was inspired by Keith Braithwaite's workshop with the same name at Software Craftsmanship 2009.

Level (beginner / intermedia / advanced) Intermediate

Track in which the content is to be categorized (see above) MethodologyPrerequisite knowledge experience with unit testing; some knowledge of TDD (some experience would be great);

Outline of the presentation
10 min. Short introduction to TDD (with a small example)
30 min. Demo - tdd, but now as if we really meant it
10 min. Reflection & summary

Rob Westgeest  QWAN Na jarenlange ervaring in OO Software ontwikkeling, met UML, verschillende onwikkelprocessen en projectaanpakken, als ontwikkelaar, trainer en projectleider deed Rob in 2000 zijn eerste XP project. En met groot succes! Sindsdien helpt hij projecten en personen bij het toepassen van agile practices, principes en waarden. Rob ontwikkelt zichzelf en anderen continu door conferenties en gebruikersbijeenkomsten zoals SPA, XP Days, XP-NL en AgileOpen te bezoeken, mede te organiseren en workshops te geven. Rob legt op een eenvoudige manier lastige problemen uit, zodat zowel de problemen als de oplossingen eenvoudig te doorgronden zijn. Hij kan anderen snel laten ervaren wat hij geleerd heeft, en loodst zodoende teams om valkuilen heen. Zijn enthousiasme en gevoel voor humor maakt met Rob werken een feest.