TechEd Blogging: "Test Driven Development with ASP.NET" in the Cabanas

After much confusion and schedule changes, I was able to take over Steve Smith's session on TDD at TechEd today (Steve was unable to attend TechEd due to military service).  Many thanks to Brian Marble for making the last minute arrangements!

The attending group was an adhoc bunch.  Although TDD is certainly growing in popularity since the group was aware of the concepts and had experiences of using some of the tools!  The session was very rushed taking just over an hour - the fastest ever for the slide deck and hands on material.  

The following interesting questions were posed afterwards:

• How do you sell Pair Programming (PP) to management?
  This paper states that PP only incurs a cost of 15% increased time.  I would argue that this still assumes that two developers on their own are still 100% productive - whereas two people working together motivate each other and ensure that more productive hours are spent developing each day rather than being occupied by distractions - phonecalls, checking email, support issues, etc.  This also says nothing of the improved quality of the code and reduced maintenance costs downstream that PP brings.
  
• If you have a large legacy system with many interconnected systems - how do you start with TDD?
  Start with the next feature.  Don't delay starting with TDD.  Don't try to retrofit all your existing code with tests.  Rather start with the next required feature and write a small test.  Mock out any interconnected systems in the simplest way to write your test.  I guess it comes down to HowDoYouEatAnElephant! :-)

I also met Mark Miller and Jason Fredrickson which resulted in a great discussion on the merits of Pair Programming!  This resulted in the trading of war stories and my discovering of a new alternative to VNC for pairing - NetOp.