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TDD - not yet infected

One of my major goals for this year was to improve the quality and efficiency of executing projects and tasks.  A significant part of this is intended to come about from the adoption of better practices... “habits“ if you like.  I started the year by trying Pair Programming and this week I've started to pay attention to Test Driven Development (TDD) for the first time.

I've been reading a TDD book and doing tutorials on my laptop on my way to and from work in the mornings this week.

For a methodology which has received so much hype and praise from well-known and respected people within the industry I must say that I'm still pretty flat on the idea.  It's not that I'm cynical - I'm not!  I would desperately love to discover that TDD is a missing cure; I'm so ready to be captivated by it and embrace it as a bold new way forward.  But, I'm finding that I really am not seeing significant benefits in what I've read to date.  I think that this may be because the author is doing such a mediocre job of selling the real winning points of TDD... alas, I shall have to wait until I've finished this book (at least) before I can hope to form any standalone opinions of my own.

3 Comments

  • What TDD books is it? I was not too impressed with Kent Beck's book. Dave Astels book is better, although the code is in Java.



    I'm looking forward to TDD in .NET by James Newkirk, that's not the one you're reading is it?? :)

  • Darrell, it's the Kent Beck book. It's not that he's not a good writer - I actually quite like his writing style - he just doesn't seem to do a great job of selling the *real* benefits of TDD.

  • Thanks Randy, I'll check it out. Senkwe, the Martin Fowler link interested me because I really couldn't imagine people getting defect counts that low; although as Martin points out, that's not necessarily directly attributable to XP and in fact he never even actually mentions TDD specifically in the entry.



    One other thing, although I have given Kent Beck's book a thumbs down, I should add that I really haven't yet read enough of it to give an honest appraisal (I'm only up to Chapter 9). The book is certainly getting better so, I'll post a full review when I'm done reading it.



    - Darren

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