TDD in the Cape

Most conventional forms of development developers use in their day to day efforts – are in the form of design first, develop after or develop and design as we go or some sort of mixture of the two. Then, just maybe – if you haven’t already juiced the tiny bit of time you have left before the deadline – you might have enough time to write a couple tests.

Recently however, I was fortunate enough to find myself plunged into the edgey world of Test Driven Development. Myself and the rest of our team spent a few days acquainting ourselves with the many interesting concepts that make up the Test Driven Development life cycle. factor10‘s TDD course was the tour, and Aslam Khan was our guide. Aslam’s angle was clearly to take what seems like the tedious and daunting attributes of TDD, and break them down into the obvious and needed design fundamentals of agility and simplicity using the test first approach. However, it’s not all sunshine and roses… once set in your ways, its a difficult and almost unbearable to break out. Needless to say I felt like a pilgrim in an unholy land :) but that soon changed.

TDD takes some guts to tackle, but once you have it fairly under your thumb it can save you hours of debugging – and any extra time you may spend scope creeping. Adjusting to the ways of TDD seem ridiculous but at the same time it doesn’t take long to realise the obvious benefits. In my honest opinion, it can be very difficult to incorporate a test first approach in your day to day development work right away – you will find there just isn’t enough time when you’re still a newbie writing tests at a snails pace. But I suggest you write just a few tests, and perhaps attempt some of your own fake tests in your spare time to increase your fluency in TDD.

The Tools

Getting started with TDD is pretty easy, all you need to do is find the appropriatte testing framework for your language of preference. There are plenty for almost all languages, for example, if you are working in C# or any .Net language you can download NUnit. NUnit is free and was originally ported from JUnit, which as you might expect is the Java counterpart.

Referencing NUnit

With your unit testing framework installed, you merely need to reference your unit testing framework in either a seperate project or in the same project as your code base, and you can write tests using their API library functions provided.