Test Driven Development with NUnit and C# (with 50 people!)

Last night I presented on the above topic at the Pittsburgh .NET User Group.  I had been having trouble in my preparation trying to figure out the best way to not only explain the concepts but to win over the audience to the TDD process.  Looking at the two wonderful books (Beck,  Astels) available on TDD made me realise something - they both explain by example!  The more I thought about it, I realised that this was the XP/TDD way - “pair with the new guy“.

But how do you pair with 50 people?  We did!  In about 40 mins (during a 2 hour session), we created the projects from scratch in VS.NET and worked on a fictitious TODO list adding features TDD-style.  People got involved - yelled out questions, helped find compile areas, questioned the small steps :-), questioned  the “fake it“ implementations and so on.

Did it work?  I had several people come up to me afterwards saying they had dabbled with TDD before but had never really got it but the practical exercise had shown them the light.  Quite a few people even mentioned that they would like to continue working on the TODO list again to see how it evolves.

My slides and code samples will be available online soon!

What are your experiences in converting people to TDD?