TDD in a REPL, Continued: Read-Eval-PrettyPrint-Loop
Last December, I wrote about using F#’s interactive REPL to facilitate TDD. Since then, enough interesting developments have happened that I think the topic is worth revisiting.
TDD
How I Learned to Love TDD
I remember one of my CS professors at Calvin starting class one day by talking about TDD (Test Driven Development). “Write your tests first, then write the code to make the tests pass,” he said. At that point in my programming career, TDD and unit testing in general just seemed like extra boilerplate code required […]
Bye-Bye, Sinon – Hello, testdouble
UPDATE: Justin Searls, the author of testdouble.js sent me an email with some notes on this post. I’ve added some his comments below to provide some additional context. I’ve been working in JavaScript-land for the last little while, writing lots of Node.js code. Since I practice TDD, I’m always trying to keep my eye on […]
TDD in a REPL
REPLs (Read-Eval-Print-Loops) are often billed as a great place to experiment and learn a language or a framework. They provide a very tight feedback loop. However, it can be difficult or time-consuming to extract the knowledge gained from a REPL and include it in your source code. I’ve hit the up arrow many times in […]
More Typing, Less Testing: TDD with Static Types, Part 2
In part 1 of this post I claimed it’s easy to test-drive our way into a poor design. We looked at some techniques for using types with TDD, but the examples were simple. Today I’ll walk through Kent Beck’s Money example showing where the design fails and how it can be improved with types.
More Typing, Less Testing: TDD with Static Types, Part 1
I learned test-driven development from Kent Beck’s book Test-Driven Development By Example. It’s an excellent introduction that whets the appetite for one of my other favorites, Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce. Both of these books have a blind spot, though: they are completely silent about how modern static […]
4 Tips for Improving Test Quality
Test-driven development is an essential discipline for any software craftsman. Similar to how accountants use double-entry bookkeeping as a safety net, software developers can use TDD as their safety net. If you need a refresher on TDD — and what it is and isn’t — I’d suggest my post on why Simply Writing Tests Is […]
TDD a New Class in NUnit & Visual Studio without Ever Using the Mouse
I’ve been working in Visual Studio a lot lately, and I’ve found a few handy plugins that are very helpful for effective test writing. A good way to show these off is to follow my process for creating a new class and test via Test Driven Development. My goal here is to improve speed by […]
A Beginning Developer’s Experience With TDD
As a summer intern at Atomic Object, I’ve learned a lot about Test-Driven Development (TDD), a practice that Atomic uses heavily. I’d used TDD in one college class, but it wasn’t really explained; we just sort of used it without knowing exactly what was going on. On my current project, we’ve been using TDD a […]
Test Driven Development: Resistance Is… Perplexing?
Recently I’ve been working with a mixed team of developers – contractors from a few companies with varied backgrounds. Our manager is sold on the value of test-driven development (TDD), but most of the team is anything but. The typical reaction to discussion of TDD is highly emotional and highly negative. This resistance is unexpected […]