Practice religious test-first development for a month

I relent.

Banging the mat three times, I give up.

There are so many distractions right now, I’ll not be doing this. Not right now. See you in a year.

Getting in the habit of making clean changesets is important. Don’t futz around with other people’s whitespace—it messes up the clarity of your changeset.

And: start your check-in comment with the Issue Number, from the bug-tracking system you use. “MAXOUTAPP-44 #44 Took out the opplomizer. Never worked.” See how I used two different notations for denoting the bug number, Jira and Trac. Could be useful sometime. If there’s software outside of Trac that creates links between an issue string and a web page for it.

Four weeks ago I complained that there’s no chance to do TDD at work. But this is about to change: soon I’ll be starting in a new position in the server team at my current employer. And it will finally give me the chance to start doing test first development also at work. I’m really looking forward to it! :)

My project of doing TDD in my school assignments was a success and I really like the TDD way of working.

At work there is currently no possibility to do TDD (maybe some day :), but I’ve been doing it for a few weeks on all of my other programming tasks and I’m really beginning to enjoy it!

In a few more weeks I can mark this task done, and then I’ll do another month of TDD, and still another :) ... and so on. You get the idea.

Wrote my first SUnit tests for the Squeak Smalltalk/Seaside web framework project that I’m working on, yesterday.
Slow going! I think I have the hang of individual tests; now I gotta figure out how to make test suites out of them, and run all the tests at once.
(Also, I have to see if Squeak has a web testing framework like the PHP one I found).

I’m mostly doing Squeak / Smalltalk development now.
I know it has unit testing framework (hell, it’s the original one), and web testing, too, so I need to go learn it.

So, test-first development has been suspended, unfortunately.

Being part of an XP team, TDD becomes part of the natural order of the day.

I like how the solution to the task at hand unfolds while writing tests for it.

milythael are still going strong on our pairing project. Taking small bites has let us make some really great progress. You can read a bit more about it here.

I spent some time yesterday ping pong pairing with milythael. He was great about encouraging me to take smaller bites, something I really have trouble with a lot of the time.

Working Test First is soooo much easier when you pair.

The very act of writing tests at the same time as writing code meant that my code was more modular and that I was able to trust it. In the long run this made the whole project more predictable and it didn’t suffer from any sudden overruns.