An introduction into the TDD Mantra
A while ago I gave a presentation, called “An introduction into the TDD Mantra”. The occasion was a technical meeting with some colleagues, to whom I wanted to introduce at least the principles behind Test-Driven Development.
A lot of people think TDD is the same as writing unit tests,
but it is not. That’s why I wanted to explain it to people. Dan Bunea also has an article about it
right here, and it seems he’ll continue this with more stories about how to do it.
My presentation slides are a more high level introduction with some statements that should trigger people to start thinking about Test-Driven Development. The part I liked most was the part where I wrote an application live, using TDD of course. You might recognize it as Robert ‘Uncle Bob’ C. Martin’s
Bowling Kata. I ‘translated’ it into C# with
an accompanying document to check if you’re doing it right. It seems Uncle Bob has done it hundreds of times over the years, I’ve done it 7 times or so now. Not once completely without errors. But that’s not bad, it’s fun to solve these in front of a live audience. And they’re just minor errors.
I also try to explain what Dependency Injection is, with some examples in code. Then a nice bridge to legacy software, in which I ask what legacy software is. It concludes with a great statement from (a colleague from) Michael Feathers, and that you should start writing unit tests immediatly, doing it the right way with Test-Driven Development.
Update: Fixed the broken links